Hi,thoughtfulgold, here. Better known as TG or T-Gold to some. Lately I’ve been fielding the question "Should I focus my routine on girth or length? Or should I mix it up?" more and more often. Really, my answer in this is complex and it derives some key points from other Penis Enlargement schools of thought, like hanging and touches on what makes exercises and devices unique from each other. But let’s begin.
First, if you’re here and reading you’ve probably heard of and done the "jelq" at least once. It’s the staff of all PE, the gold standard for an exercise that increases length and girth for almost everyone. The reason being, the nature of the exercise inflicts minor trauma (tears in the tissues) to the sides of the penis, which will be repaired slightly larger and the corpus cavernosum is a particular area of the penis to note here. The jelq also stretches the ligaments holding the penis in place and adds trauma there as well. The jelq is just one of many different means to the same end: enlargement. Usage of it and it alone can grant you great gains in length and girth but this is where I bring my theory into play.
Exercises at a gym follow these same rules. You exercise and push a muscle to its limits, it heals back bigger and stronger. However, a principle often utilized at the gym does not get utilized in PE that I find should be. Variety.
The issue with PE is that there are only so many ways to stretch and stress the penis, especially if your budget has limited you to hands only PE. However, many people stick with the same exercises and devices and wonder why their gains drop off relatively soon despite increasing intensity and usage patterns. That is because of endurance. Any gym rat will tell you that they hit almost every machine in the gym over the course of a week. That they keep the exercises they do varied because doing the same thing actually decreases in effect over time. This can be applied to Penis Enlargement as well, to great effect. Actually, in some schools of thought, it already is.
Hanging, for example, advocates changing position and weights regularly. This keeps the ligaments that hanging targets for change and regeneration on the defense. It slows their ability to adapt and toughen up, which stymies the hanging process if you aren’t careful. It isn’t painful at all if your ligaments toughen up but…it basically lowers your ability to continue to gain. I ran into this when I was hanging and read the Hanging 101 thread which basically explained my old tactic of using the same setting (which had worked with my extender) had actually set me back in my hanging endeavors. Because I had hung in the same direction, when I stopped feeling strain I didn’t change positions and kept upping the weight. This turned my ligaments as tough as nails…so no more gains came (and I hadn’t really gotten much either) and there was nothing I could do about it without more knowledge.
I started talking with Big Al Alfaro and he introduced me to the "Deconditioning Break". Mainly, in his recommended routines he will have you take an entire week off of all PE, devices or exercises or whatever, every 6 weeks. This gives your body a chance to rest, recharge, heal and…also, decondition a bit. So that the traumas you were doing over the last 5 weeks that you were starting to adjust to, are more of a shock to the system and can be more effective than they were the last time you were doing them. As I utilized this system I found that when I was pumping or when I was doing any particular device…that gains would come then stop but if I left a device alone or stopped doing an exercise for a while, then they would become effective again. That is the effect of deconditioning. The body appears to have 3 states of being, regarding any particular exercise or activity that it does.
Unconditioned: Where it is significant strain or discomfort to perform the action at all. Repetitions are not going to be high, intensity is low. Taking reps or intensity too high can cause injury.
*Note- This is what we mean when we refer to unconditioned penises and newbies to PE. This is why we don’t recommend excessive routines or device use. The odds of high intensity activities being effective instead of dangerous is too low and not worth the risk.
Conditioned: Where the body is adjusted to the stress and demand of the activity in question. Repetitions are based on strength and endurance. Taking reps or intensity higher results in fatigue but not necessarily in a bad way.
Over-Conditioned/numb/Strong or "The point of diminishing returns": The body has adjusted so completely to the stress and demand of the activity in question no new trauma can form. It does not push the body to its limits and the exercise or activity has lost effectiveness and the return is no longer worth the time and effort to perform said action. Repetitions higher or intensity higher may have no or so little effect frustration may result and often this is where people experiment to the point of injury searching for the body’s new limits to push them.
Okay, so you read half of my research paper. Now you want to know "How does this effect me focusing on length or girth?" Well, here is how.
If you focus length exercises and use devices designed for length gains…you’ll gain in length. But the more you focus on only one thing, the more those targeted areas will become stronger and more resistant to the traumas you wish to put them through. Meaning, your ligaments, from regular and repeated trauma will toughen up. So will the other tissues you are continually stressing. Without variety in exercise and deconditioning breaks to throw your body and its desire to regenerate and defeat the exercises that stress it, the body can easily focus on one area to reinforce to stop future traumas. PE is a game of scheduled traumas, if the body stymies too much of them then there can be no gains at all.
An example I will use was someone I was observing back on the X4 forum. A user was using the X4 Labs Extender, he had gained a bit, I want to say about .5" in length. So he upped his tension levels and wear times and started on an ADS while he wasn’t in the Extender. Not only did he not gain, he triggered his body’s "turtling" reflex hard enough that the gains he had were lost AND he couldn’t get them back using those devices as his body had adjusted to the stresses that they were putting on his penis.
This person was using almost no rest days, the longer the routine stretched the less he rested. He had never taken a deconditioning break. And after repeated regular trauma his body adapted to the forces and so adding more time and more intensity did nothing.
By comparison, some of the biggest gainers on that forum took the typical 5 days on and 2 days off schedule or more days off and continued to gain regularly without having to resort to ridiculous levels of force or extra devices. They scheduled their trauma to the penis on certain days and allowed it to heal and decondition on other days, which kept the process of inflicting the stretching trauma effective. The same exact thing goes for any exercise or device.
Additionally, and this is why I recommend multiple devices or exercises for length or girth if they are your goals, when you switch trauma types. As in instead of you doing Squeezes for girth, you do Clamping for a while, your body is not prepared for clamping at all and you will gain more with less force. But after 6 weeks of Clamping your body won’t be ready for Squeezes like it was 12 weeks ago so you can start gaining again from squeezes as well. But I don’t recommend focusing on only one aspect because the more you can do different trauma SAFELY to the penis WITHOUT OVERDOING IT the more potential there is to gain.
This does not mean do Pumping, Clamping, and Squeezes in one session. Or even in the same week. Too much trauma is quite simply going to result in an injury. That’s overdoing it. Just keeping it varied will keep all of it effective. That difference needs be seen and noted. This goes for multiple length exercises as well. Often, our desire to do more will take us past our reasonable limits. And we only need exceed those by a small amount for good gains. A large amount may be better gains but is more likely a serious injury in the making.
To recap, Penis Enlargement as a practice is scheduled traumas to the penis.
* Too much of the same trauma builds resistance to it quickly
* Too much trauma at a time causes an injury that is counter productive or causes tissue retraction and resistance at a rate that will render your exercise or device useless faster and require you to change approaches at least for the time being if not longer term.
* Too little variety will still build resistance over time, even if you are still gaining
* Even if you do not have access to or the ability to vary devices and exercises a deconditioning break can be used to great effect to refresh the usefulness of the resources you have available
* If you have reached the point of diminishing returns, you can still do the exercise or device but it will require an extended time away from it for your body to be less prepared to receive that trauma again. This is more effective than continuing to amp up duration and intensity as it is not directly tempting serious injury risks. Overdoing it is never comparable to the effectiveness of a deconditioning break and a deconditioning break is safer by many magnitudes.
* Focusing length and girth with one exercise during a session is more effective than focusing length OR girth with two as it targets more areas of the penis and makes it less likely to adapt quickly. Over time the benefit is more obvious than the short term gains. This is at your discretion.
Keep in mind, that this is thoughtfulgold’s theory on Penis Enlargement as "Scheduled Traumas" and that some schools of thought require no serious changes in routine to see regular gains. However, in my experience, for people across disciplines of PE, variety is better overall. Your mileage may vary.
Please share your thoughts and experiences. Comment. As I said before, this is my theory and is based on my own observations and experiences through seven years of PE and thousands of dollars spent on various devices and services.
Hope it helps.
