Progress after a year or longer off?

To those who have taken long breaks (a year or more) and then resumed PE, how well did you gain after the break compared to before? Did the rest help, hurt or make no difference?

Despite hanging 40-60 sets a week, I was stuck with zero gains for over nine months. At the end, I was hanging up to 27.5 pounds. I basically quit and didn’t do any PE for almost a year.

Now in the last four months, I’ve managed to gain 0.375” EL and 0.25” EG. It’s like being a newbie all over again.

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of searching and reading on deconditioning breaks. Hobby, you and others have generated a lot of very good information on this topic.

I’m thinking of testing either 3 months on, 1 month off or 4 on, 1 off.

I find a lot of reports of members making gains for roughly three months before gains stall or dramatically slow down. If you add a month for cementing (or at least attempted cementing), that puts you at four months. Given the reports from others, plus the fact that a lot of biological cycles are monthly, a one month break seems like it might be a good minimum starting point for a decondintioning break.

What do you guys think?

I believe that deconditioning breaks should be longer than one month. Maybe perhaps 5 or 6 months. Reason being, after hanging such heavy weight on your dick for so long, your ligs/tunica toughen up. To weaken and get back to a somewhat normal state, it must take longer than just a month.

Although I am not speaking from PE experience with breaks, I could relate it to muscle or flexibility gains. After I stopped working out, I held on to my general muscular shape for many months after. After gaining flexibility I hang on to that for months later.

The body takes a long time to actually change.

>Despite hanging 40-60 sets a week, I was stuck with zero gains for over nine months. At the end, I was hanging up to 27.5 pounds. I basically quit and didn’t do any PE for almost a year.

Wow, you definitely squeezed all you could out of it before stopping. How much did you gain from PE before the break, and in what time frame? Did you lose any size with the time off?

>Now in the last four months, I’ve managed to gain 0.375” EL and 0.25” EG. It’s like being a newbie all over again.

Excellent! :up: How does this compare to your gains in the initial 4 months of PE? I’m wondering what percentage of one’s original newbie rate is possible in Round 2.

What is your routine now? If hanging, how much weight are you using and on what schedule? How much did your tissues weaken?

>I find a lot of reports of members making gains for roughly three months before gains stall or dramatically slow down.

Yep.

>If you add a month for cementing (or at least attempted cementing), that puts you at four months. Given the reports from others, plus the fact that a lot of biological cycles are monthly, a one month break seems like it might be a good minimum starting point for a decondintioning break.

I agree a month is a good minimum for a break. Last year I intended to try basically what you’re suggesting, but a bad vein wrecked my plan. I was thinking 2 months hanging, then 1-2 off.

I’ve experimented with short breaks a few times and found I reconditioned quickly. I made better than usual progress the first month back, but the rate fell back down to usual for the second month. Each guy would probably have to experiment to find which schedule works best for him, and even then the optimum is likely to change over time.

Even with cycling as described above the cumulative conditioning will probably reach the point where a truly long break is needed. I suspect a guy who hasn’t hit the wall yet would probably gain more overall in a given time span (say 2 years) using something like 2-3 on/1-2 off instead of 6 on/6 off. But you may be right.

Hey Hobby. I took an *unintentional* year off just because of laziness. Got back and started with some basic stretches, then went into hanging. Gained almost nothing. But this was before I read your thread on Strategic Deconditioning so I wasn’t really expecting anything. Anyway, my routine page is here if you’re interested: My stats .

Hobby,

Sorry to hear about your vein problem. I had read about it in one of the deconditioning threads. It has to be very frustrating.

To answer your questions:

Before the break, I had gained 0.5” BPEL, 0.625” BPFS and 0.5” EG in a little over 4.5 months. Then I continued to hang another nine months without any gains.

The only time I measured during the break was about two months before I started again. I was at 8.125”. So a loss of about 0.125”. I didn’t measure girth.

Since starting back, I’ve used a couple of different routines. For the first 1.5 months I was dry jelqing only. Basically just 5-10 minutes, four time a day.

Next I started experimenting with different clamping variations. I probably spent a month fooling around trying different things.

The last couple of months have been a routine of 20-30 min of “modified” clamping following by 50 “modified” dry jelqs. One day on, one day off. I don’t know for sure, but I think this routine has given me the majority of my gains.

No, I have not done any hanging. But since you asked, and I’ve been kind of curious about too, I went checked things out. This afternoon, I dusted off the ol’ Bib hanger and had at it. Depending on the angle, I would probably start hanging with weights 2.5 to 5.0 lbs. above my original starting weights. I am nowhere near the weights I ended with.

Sorry you didn’t get another bout of newbie gains, Alrdybig. Did you stop all PE during the year off? No occasional jelqing or stretching?

MX, that’s encouraging. To summarize for anyone skimming through this thread:

First 4.5 months: 1/2” BPEL, 1/2” girth
9 months hanging with no further progress
A year off
First 4 months back: 3/8” BPEL, 1/4” girth

The break probably helped. It may be entirely responsible for your renewed progress. But, switching over to clamping adds another variable.

Maybe the combination of time off and changing techniques is the key?

Good. :)

Yes. I felt doing PE was useless if I was still a virgin and that it’d be better for me to get involved in discussions at fastseduction.com and leave PE alone. So, I did no PE whatsoever.

I was hoping more members would post on this thread.

In attempting to come up with time frames for decondintioning breaks, I found this info on the web:

A rough estimate of how long it will take for a broken bone to heal in a cast.
==========
Collar bone 3-8 weeks
Scapula - shoulder blade 3 weeks
Upper arm 4 weeks
Lower arm 6 weeks
Wrist 3 - 8 weeks
Fingers 3 weeks
Pelvis 2 - 6 weeks
Upper leg 12 weeks
Knee 3 weeks
Lower leg 6-8 weeks
Ankle 6 weeks
Foot 3 - 12 weeks
Toes 3 weeks
==========

Obviously, a broken bone and a maxed out dick aren’t the same thing. But if a bone can heal in 3-12 weeks, it seems to me that should be enough time before your unit might be ready for another round of PE.

What do you guys think?

I know that torn ligaments require as much time to heal as bone fractures, usually about six-to-eight weeks. So thats about two months healing time. But deconditioning…

From reading posts here, it seems the longer the time off, the greater the “newbie response” when returning to PE. So I would agree, the window starts at about two months out. Now what is the length of that window? After say, six months, would you get any more deconditioned with further rest? I imagine the amount of deconditoning is not linear with the time used, and results in diminishing returns.

There is a member here who only PE’s for a couple of months each year, yet gets results about as good as you would imagine someone getting who PE’d straight through.

I’m going through a torn ligament repair right now, so I’ve done a fair bit of reading on it lately. I found somewhere that it said for a 5-9 year old a broken bone could be 3-4 weeks, but for a 65+ year old it could be as much as 6 months. I guess this has a lot to do with growth hormone, metabolism, cell efficiency etc. so it’s hard to put real numbers on it. Also, a fully healed bone/ligament in strength terms wouldn’t necessarily equate to a ‘naturalised’ structure. It could go on for many years. A couple of scars that I got as a child and were still visible in adulthood have faded in the last decade or so to the point where some of them are getting hard to distinguish.

My newbie gains were my best ever. I attribute this partly to ‘hidden’ penis, and partly to beginners tissues. My longest decondition (break) was about 18 months, and it didn’t get me any better gains than taking 2-3 months off, which seems to be optimal for me. When I say that 2-3 months is my optimal, it’s worth bearing in mind that I’ve not done too much hardcore PE, and like to stick to only enough to get the job done, then quit again until some more gains are ready to appear. The exception was a couple of weeks of seriously dangerous levels of clamping.

I’m on day 45 of deconditioning after my gains stalling last time. I’ll start again probably mid April, where I expect to be able to coax another 5-6mm.

Me too. There must be more guys reading this who have taken long breaks.

Yep. I have done “hardcore” PE, though I don’t plan to ever again.

Once your gains have stopped or dramatically slowed, when do you guys take a break? In other words, do you persist for while in attempt to “cement” or do you immediately take a break? If you do persist, for how many weeks or months?

Come on guys, please share your thoughts and experiences. Your input has the potential to help a lot of members.

As soon as gains stop (which I’ll notice within 1-2 weeks) I stop PE. In doing this I seem to lose nothing in about 2 weeks, but if left longer then I lose about 3mm.

Here are some real BPFSL examples from my log (converted to mm for convenience due to small increments) I stopped when gains hadn’t been made in the last week or so:

Start 9 Jul 03: 174mm (note: in late 2000 when I first discovered PE I was somewhere around 165-170mm BPFSL)
Stop 22 Jul 04: 187mm

Start 9 Aug 03: 190mm (don’t know where the gain came from)
Stop 2 Sept 03: 193mm

9 Nov 03: 190mm (One day test, just to see if gains had stuck or not)

Start 13 Jul 04: 187mm
Stop 9 Aug 04: 197mm

Start 24 Nov 04: 197mm
Stop 2 Feb 05: 202mm

23 Feb 05: 203mm (One day test, just to see if gains had stuck or not)

Start 05 April 05: 200mm
(From here I’m hoping for maybe 5mm+ gain in the next few weeks.)

As you can see, with some minor variance, I make a new gain, then quit without cementing after which given enough time the numbers diminish somewhat. This doesn’t concern me since I know that once I start again I’ll recover the uncemented area and surpass it by a little more, then I go back to taking a couple of months off and enjoying my life.

The above exercises were at the start each day, but in the latest one only every third or fourth day. The exercises comprised of a very thorough warm up with just a few minutes stretching. There are various other things I’ve tried along the way including hormones, growth factors etc, but nothing has shown as much promise as a basic simple routine and time and lots of heat.

I’m still a fan of Bromelain which I gobble down in bulk while on cycle (inhibits inflammation extremely well) and this time I’ll be doing 5g of MSM daily too (also prevents inflammation, but by making cell walls more permeable so reducing pressure differences on the inside and outside of cell). These two natural and very safe supplements I am looking to test to see if they prevent adaptation better than without using them. The next thing I’m considering building is the static stretcher device to replace manual stretching, but this may or may not make it into the current cycle.