Time to Get Scientific

So, I’m a scientist by profession: I do research related to human health and medicine. Given my background, I prefer to judge things based on systematic evidence; unfortunately, there has never been a proper study of PE. Now, I’m fairly new to PE (been at it for a couple of months) and, based on the results I’ve seen, I’m convinced that PE works; the question I have is what factors affect growth and how can we maximize our potential. I’ve been thinking that it would be great to conduct a study among the people here at Thunder’s and would like to get some feedback. First, let me say, I want to do this for the benefit of this community and am not doing this to publish — in other words, I’d be doing this in a personal, not professional, capacity, and the results would only be posted here at Thunder’s. Having said that, my idea is to setup an online survey to collect information from participants (I’m thinking that we could use survey monkey or something similar — I haven’t looked into this yet) and, once we had the data, I could do a proper data analysis, write up the results, and post them here at Thunder’s.

Here are the questions that I’ve thought of including in the survey so far:
-Starting BPEL?
-Starting EG?
-Starting FSL?
-Current BPEL?
-Current EG?
-Current FSL?

-Amount of time doing PE (how many months/years have you been doing PE?)
-Average hours per day (how long is your average routine?)
-Average days per week (how many times a week do you do your routine?)

-What is your routine? (Would collect details here)
*NOTE: I would want to configure survey to allow people to show changes in their routine over time

-When you started PE, were you a shower or grower?
-Are you currently a shower or a grower?

-Do you feel that you have pronounced dorsal thickening (often described as a “steel cable” running along the top of your penis that can be felt when stretched)?

-How old were you when you started doing PE?

-What is your LOT?

My first question to all of you is, does this sound like something that people are interested in? Second, does anyone have any other ideas for questions we should ask in this survey? Third, what hypotheses would you want to see tested? I’ve been thinking about a number of possible hypotheses (phrased here as questions): does age affect gains? What is the average rate of gain? Do gains differ between showers and growers? Does LOT affect growth? What exercises work best for showers vs growers? What exercises work best for people of a given LOT? What exercises work best for people with pronounced dorsal thickening?

I would love to hear people’s input on this idea. Also, being fairly new, I can’t post in the main forum yet — could this post be moved there? Thanks

-Rooster

I could be wrong, but it seems most of the data you are searching for are in our PE database.

Hi Marinera,

Some of the data does seem to be in the PE database, but the database doesn’t seem to collect information on things like grower vs shower, pronounced dorsal thickening, LOT or other such factors that we all wonder about. Also, the csv of the database only seems to give me measurements with no information on the other variables (e.g. Information about one’s routine). If you know of a way to get this info from the database, that would be great. Thanks.

IMO, forget about LOT.

In the data site when you click on a user it will show their measurements and in the top left corner of the same box it will say view XXXX's routine.

^^Right. About dorsal thickening, I don’t know how to collect such data - I don’t actually know any vaible way to know if one has a dorsal thickening more pronounced than average. Grower vs shower doesn’t seem to make any difference as far as gains are concerned, you can do a search about some polls have been made I think.

Thanks for the info about the data site. I’ve been looking through there and, unfortunately, the quality of the data is not high enough for a proper analysis. With regard to LOT, I get the impression (in your posts and elsewhere) that the theory is no longer well regarded, but thought it might be worth including for verification. The issue of measuring dorsal thickening is difficult, but I think that a well designed questionnaire can do a reasonable job at getting this information. So, if you don’t think that these questions are worth exploring, what questions would you want answered?

Which routine is most effective; What’s the minimal amount of time required to have gains (on average); what’s the optimal length of a decon-break; what’s the best amount of tension that should be used to have length gains. Trifles like those. :)

Hello Mate,

If I can give you the best tip, would be to create a Google Spreadsheet or a Mini-webpage as a survey so that you have a easy and functional way to collect this data so that you can manipulate it more easily.

I (and the community) can give you tips on this, but the basis is below.
Drape’s Takes: Surveys Via Google Spreadsheets

Best Regards,

Cool thread…..keep it a secret roosterstretch!!!

I’m pleased that a professional scientist has interest in researching PE. On the other hand, seeing your starting post, I’m a bit disappointed. My gut feeling is that a new attempt to correlate the same kind of data, gathered in the same non-scientific way, has the same chance as any previous attempt: to yield a lose correlation of vague parameters, nothing relevant enough to draw a conclusion…
I.M.H.O. the main issue would be to find out which mechanism of growth is responsible for PE gains: cell growth, plastic deformation, or both of them at different stages (for example newbie gains = plastic deformation, further gains = tissue growth), or something else, not yet considered? How could we find proofs for penile tissue growth? Could we imagine an instrumental method to detect it? Such data would be crucial to take PE from pure amateur experimentation, based on mere hypothesis, to a scientific base.

Sure, readily available data about BPEL, EG, BPFSL, etc. have to be integrated into any scientific research, but at the moment those data are very inaccurate. While people take length measurements eyeballing a nonstandard ruler, held differently by each individual - without a unique protocol of measurements, those data are too inaccurate.
Each person’s routine is unique, even if they claim they are doing the same exercises. There is no standard description for reproducible routines, no measured forces that are applied for grip, or stretch, actually nothing is reproducible. What to correlate with what, when each case is a particular case?!

I think the way to go is not the one everybody tried before without any real success. Try something different with emphasis on the mechanism of growth. If you can get proofs for it, that would advance PE much more then finding out that “400 jelqs yield 0.01 cubic mm growth on average”. We are in darkness about what really happens when we see gains. If we could understand the mechanisms involved (having proofs), maximising gains would follow instantly.

People have basically maximised there gains through trial and error(possibly). What you suggested would take the guess work out of things especially for inexperienced PE’ers I admit. Also you don’t exactly know what type of scientist he is. It must be really difficult to prove any PE theories but yes good suggestions, maybe he’s capable but wouldn’t he need to do research on real penis tissue and things. Possibly using himself as an experiment, I really have no clue how you’d try and measure plastic deformation other than just measuring before and after a timed PE exercise(hanging would be the most steady). I just hope for his sake when analysing this stuff the penis doesn’t need to be dissected ;)

Marineras questions are definitely ones I’d like answered.

Mr Nye, I loved your show as a kid/young adult. Thanks.

I think there could be a few more questions:

How often do you have sex?
How often do you masturbate?
Do you have sex/masturbate more/less/the same as you did pre-PE?
Have you ever had an injury which required you to stop PEing?
If so, how long did you have to stop?

…the first two questions could shed some light on the sex/masturbation/ejaculation while doing PE controversy.

Thanks for all the input guys. Marinera, your questions are excellent and definitely need to be addressed. Jim, I also like your ideas to get at the sex/masturbation question.

Cervixhunter, you make a number of good points. I share your desire to do some research into mechanisms of growth, but such a study would require following a group of people for a couple of years from just before they begin PE and would require serious tests (like cell biopsies, MRI scans, DXA scans, and the like). In other words, we’d be looking at a study in the million dollar range. Sadly, I’m not a rich man (any wealthy PE’ers out there want to fund such a study? ;) ). I also agree that even the best questionnaire will yield imperfect results; but still, imperfect results from a systematic survey and proper analysis are better than the informal polls and anecdotal evidence we are working with now. So, this won’t be a perfect or definitive study, but it will be something that, like Audacia said, should offer us something more to go on then trial and error, and anecdotal evidence. Again, referring the Audacia’s comment, I’m a epidemiologist, so an anatomical study like you suggest is a bit outside my area of expertise.

Mbg, thanks for the google spreadsheet suggestions; if you don’t mind, I might PM you down the line to explore that option.

Thanks for all the input — keep it coming!

Please don’t consider my intervention as an attempt to discourage your efforts! They are welcome and I hope a lot of people will support it with data, myself included.

I’m not that optimistic to dream about million dollars research, but I think there could be affordable alternative ways for gathering relevant data to decide about the growth mechanism. I’d be happy to see anyone come out with ideas. I really mean affordable things, like measuring the weight and density of the penis. I didn’t think about procedural details yet, but it’s an example of the alternative data I consider useful to prove/reject a hypothesis.