More Hanging Sets or Adding Extender

OK, first things first, this is probably the wrong section of the forum for this question but it is the only one I can post in being that I am a new member (in posts, not duration), but if a mod moves it into the proper section for me that would be cool as I would probably get more replies and perhaps more useful/well-informed replies (not that the members looking at this part of the forum are not well-informed or useful!).

So my question first, and then I will include some pertinent information about myself that should probably factor into responses, for those of you who want to read it, that is.

I am currently hanging and recently purchased Monkeybar’s VacExtender 4 mainly to use as an ADS, but I splurged and got the extender too, just in case. My PE tool chest is getting very complete these days (just need a Bathmate, but I have a badass homemade water pump in the works), but I digress. I want to know if the members here believe I should add more hanging sets to my routine to fill my extra time at night, or fill the time wearing the VacExtender. I would, of course, add in hanging sets or extender time slowly and incrementally but which approach do you readers think would yield better results?

It seems to me more hanging would always produce better results per unit time, but maybe there is something I’m missing or forgetting to factor in.

OK, so about me:
I have posted here once before like a few years ago, but I failed to really get rolling on the PE thing at that time, and since then I have done a week of it here and there, but never really got consistent. All manual stuff I might add, jelqing and stretching mainly. I was bodybuilding then powerlifting competitively at the time and just didn’t have a lot of time. But all that changed about two or three months ago when I realized I have a lot more free time now and I got this overwhelming desire to start the PE again and take it seriously. And I bought a pump. Investing the money really played a big part I think. Now buying and building new and better equipment is on my mind a lot.

Starting stats: I was not born small, and I have read posts on here where cats criticized guys for doing PE when they already had a bigger than average cock, but I want to do it so go ahead and call me greedy, insecure, impractical, or self-obsessed - you might just be right, but I’m doing it anyhow! :) So to begin with I was: 7.75 BPEL, 4.875 MSEG, 5.25 BEG, those numbers are in inches, and for those of you who like fractions that is 7 3/4 BPEL, 4 7/8 MSEG, and 5 1/4 BEG. Kinda skinny for my length, but decent size I suppose. If I quoted different sizes in my original post those years ago I was wrong, the numbers here are the result of multiple measurements all done according to the specifications I have seen on this forum.

My journey so far: I started out pumping for about a month with an air pump with a gauge and pistol-grip hand-pump along with stretches, V-stretches, A-stretches and jelqs all done before pumping with some (inconsistent) JAI piss-pulls throughout the day at work. I wanted to gain length before I worked on girth and for some reason I thought a pump combined with a good manual routine was the way to go. When I measured after one month I was very, very wrong. After one month of pumping at lowish pressure (-4 to -6 bars Hg) and slowly building up session length to two sessions of 15 minutes, along with the manual exercises I listed earlier and some pump stretches (pulling on the tube, stretching it to the sides and up and down, etc.), I measured in at 5.25 (5 1/4)” MSEG and 5.75 (5 3/4)” BEG with no gain in length (maybe 1/16” but I don’t think so). I think my base grew a bit more because it got WAY MORE expansion in the tube since I didn’t use one of those pump sleeves or a condom. I was getting thicker and I had always heard the (very unscientific) argument that it is easier to stretch a thinner noodle/rubber band. I bought a bib hanger immediately after reading more about what is best for length gains. One off-topic note on pumping: the girth gains I got have been MOSTLY permanent - there was a little shrinkage, but I am measuring at nearly the same girth. I guess what I’m saying is, in the big debate between the hardcore/experienced pumpers and the “fluid-retention” community, I now believe (based on admittedly very little experience) that pumping can yield permanent results - I was far too inconsistent on my jelqing for the first couple weeks for the growth to have come from anything else. When I achieve my desired length and start working on girth I will definitely continue pumping - hopefully with the water pump I am acquiring the parts for currently - along with some clamping.

So anyhow, I started hanging and have really got the hang (no pun intended) of wrapping, minimizing twisting, using the BTC angle, managing/”riding” fatigue, hanger tightness and placement (that was HUGELY important), and my skin has stretched enough that the stress is now firmly on the internal structures of the penis and the ligs. It feels very productive and I have gained between 1/4” to 3/8” in length in the two-ish (maybe a week less) months I’ve been going at it so far. In short, loving it! I hang between 6 and 9 20-min. Sets a day always with one of those sets right after waking and one right before bed, the rest are right after work in the afternoon. Split sets make sense to me. And Bib said they work and that should be reason enough! :) I also do between 160-200 50-60% erection-level jelqs right after my long afternoon hanging session and will be slowly and incrementally increasing that number over time in the future. VERY slowly, in fact, because I think the jelqs are mainly for circulation and EQ in this routine - not a primary driving force behind growth.

I just bought the VacExtender/ADS as I explained earlier, and will be wearing it as an ADS during work on weekdays and anytime I am not hanging/extending on weekends. Except while sleeping. I looked at ANS, but I kept running into the word “tissue necrosis,” what an awful sounding phrase! I will mainly be using the ADS to “heal extended,” minimize connective tissue toughening, and all that jazz and perhaps get a little more in the length gains department (though I’m not counting on this) while I’m working and otherwise wasting time that could be better spent finding ever-more-inventive ways to pull on my cock. So now I have this extender too and about two or three hours on weekdays and a bunch of time most weekends that is free and private - except for my girlfriend, but she knows and, aside from a few disturbed looks (I mean can you blame her? Hanging weights from your dick is weird), doesn’t care. So the question again: more hanging sets or throw on the VacExtender (or regular extender) during my free time? Or more ADS is an option too, but that just seems less productive.

Thanks for any replies I get, and sorry I wrote a book for this one! Figured I needed to include that information for informed responses.

Sorry about the double post, but I just reviewed my old post from three years back and my measurements were actually pretty accurate. But that is all I am proud of in that thread. I said some totally douchey things that I feel I need to apologize to the entire community for. I actually said I wanted to be an “alpha-male.” I can’t ever see that coming out of my mouth or off of my keyboard - even three years ago - but it did. I also made a reference to having to skip PE because “my girlfriend had other plans for my cock,” like I needed to tell everyone on the internet I got some play. Wow. No more of that ridiculous stuff. Promise. ;)

Welcome home Rootsnatty,

That sounds like an awful lot of work for your dick, are you really well conditioned, has jelqing stopped working? With all that going on you seem to be setting yourself up for slow gains due to toughening up your dick.

I sometimes pump after jelqing, sometimes I hang in the evening but I cycle the intensity up over a four to six week period then I take a couple of weeks break and start again. I’m not slagging your routine at all but why do more and gain less when you can do less and gain more?

I hear ya Behemoth, and actually totally agree with you about the best place to start being manual exercises/the newbie routine, but from the standpoint of practicality I know I will not stick to an all manual routine. Pumping was definitely not the right place to start or me, after almost every session (even though I went slow and basically followed the pumping guide on this forum) I would get terrible spotting and even low pressures felt like they were gonna cause my dick to rupture. Despite the decently quick girth gains I got I felt like pumping was just too much, too soon. Now hanging on the other hand just feels right. I am gaining length quickly, using weights feels right to me probably because of my experiences lifting, and the fatigue you get from hanging (something I have never experienced from manuals or pumping) is a good psychological motivator - for me, it indicates I am doing enough work, without doing damage and feeling pain, and growing.

Now, in terms of the volume of work I am doing hanging, I have basically followed the hanging guides from Bib and Blink to the letter. I started out at 2 pounds for three 20-min. Sets and slowly added sets first, one a week, “maximizing my privacy time” as both of them advocate, then after reaching six sets I began adding weight, no more than one pound a week, split into 1/2 pound increments equally spaced in the week. A couple times I have done a few extra sets but this was only when a weight caused no fatigue and I needed extra sets to get there - usually I would be scheduled to increase the weight the next day. The ADS is also a recommendation from Blink in his guide on this site - light tension, just as an anti-turtling measure, and I have read Bib writing on multiple occasions that adding an ADS might be the only thing he might do differently if he did it all over again. Now I guess I am just realizing I have more privacy time to maximize and I have this extender too that I could throw in the mix if I wanted. That cat DLD from the MOS forums advocates hanging and using an extender together, but he always immediately follows by saying you need the SizeGenetics extender which makes me think he is just trying to sell that extender for a kickback or something.. Anyway, I will probably just continue to follow those veterans’ advice and continue to add a set a week until I have maximized my privacy time, but if anyone has other suggestions that’s why I started the thread. Thanks!

P.S. - I am not sure if I properly conveyed this in my original post, I am no longer pumping or doing all those stretches I listed in my first post, just hanging with 160-200 jelqs currently, everyday.

I would throw weights and do just the extender, starting hanging only when the extender is not working anymore. Always go from the ligther force to the more intense force, because our goals is to maximize elongation while minimize strenghtening.

Thanks for the input. I just don’t see how that is not exactly what hanging does - low load/intensity to progressively higher load/intensity. Also, that idea is something I’ve seen talked about many times. That is, manual stretches progress to extender progress to hanging to maximize gains at each level of force before moving on to the next. I see the logic behind that idea, and I know many people profess that, but that principal is simply not totally in line with what we know about connective tissue deformation, of the plastic variety. Tissue adaptation and toughening does happen, but that is overcome through increased loading, periodizing the work (in this case, targeting new tissues while the toughened tissues get used to the newly decreased loading they are experiencing due to changed angle and weaken slightly), and keeping the connective tissue fatigued (applying loaded stretch at short enough intervals that the connective tissue has not completely healed and the bunching/crimping that occurs in healing connective tissue is minimized as it is pulled straight once more). A good real-world example is gymnasts. I have had the pleasure of training a couple and if you asked them if they got their unreal flexibility by slowly going to a good stretch and not applying any loading to the stretch until every level of self-loaded stretching yielded no more increases in flexibility they will say “hell no! We do loaded, often painful, partner stretching and weighted stretching.” Not that pain should ever be the goal, but to cause more and more plastic deformation of connective tissue, a greater and greater stretching force must be applied - and that means a steady increase in intensity. Hanging, thus far, is the best way to accomplish this in a controlled, quantifiable manner that the PE community has discovered thus far. Tissue adaptation and strengthening happens, but there are so many ways to manage this, that the most important factor in terms of the efficiency of making progress is progressively, incrementally increased intensity/loading. Good example from the PE community: compare the gains per unit time of someone who starts out hanging to someone who starts out extending. A really big extender gainer will gain an inch after 1000+ hours, while an average or just slightly above average hanger will make the same gain in 4 months (about 160 hours). This hanger is still nowhere near the maximum weight he can achieve hanging after 4 months if he has only been adding a maximum of 1 pound per week, and he might still only be focusing on his ligs, he still has his tunica to target and fulcrums to implement, each with a renewed progression in intensity, before he needs to get creative, and even then there are still new places to go and old, atrophied/deconditioned places to return to..

No disrespect to anyone who believes in maximizing each form of force delivery before moving onto the next most intense, but as someone who has a graduate degree in kinesiology, is a certified trainer and strength and conditioning specialist, and has spent four years training athletes for all aspects of their chosen game, including flexibility, it is not the most efficient or effective way to achieve connective tissue deformation.

I guess that kind of is why I am leaning towards hanging extra sets in my I filled free time, but I do not claim to be the foremost authority on tissue deformation so if anyone wants to elaborate on the merits of extending before hanging, or why I should add the extender vs. More hanging sets in my extra free time, I will be glad to listen and discuss.

I’m not sure extending before hanging has any merits. It seems to be a way of applying a force below that which is needed for plastic deformation and as such probably providing an impetus for the penis to adapt to the stress by strengthening.

Though I think you are right, that increased stress over time is a requirement and that hanging provides a quantifiable approach, it is also a static method - generally speaking. When doing partner stretches, the force is not particularly quantifiable but the way the force is applied is eased into and constantly varied, whether intent or not.

Maybe the better approach would be to add some dynamic element to your hanging by standing and gently swinging the weights slightly to change the way the force is borne during a session or doing some sets with greater weight but partially holding the weight for much of the session. This removes an element of the quantifiable nature of hanging but how does it fit with your knowledge of stretching generally?

Bib, used to talk here (and probably still does on his forum) about hanging for many, many hours a day. I can see how this might be of benefit but there must be limits but I cannot see how using a low force for a long period will help.

As low as a force possible while maintaining enough to elongate. I presume that adding hours means that more micro-tears occur (Probably a percentage of the original tear occured during earlier sets). Fatigue being the reason the same amount of force still nets gains.

Same squeeze, more juice.

>As low as a force possible while maintaining enough to elongate. <

I’m not sure and extender can provide that.

>I presume that adding hours means that more micro-tears occur (Probably a percentage of the original tear occured during earlier sets)<

Certainly more time should equal more damage but the scale of the damage may change dependent on the number of sets. One question is what is the maximal amount of damage that can be done without causing scarring and is that the long term best solution for growth or is taking more time and growing at a slower speed more efficacious in the long run.

Hi Rootsnatty,

Talk of stretching ligaments and tendons in order to get more flexibility, although has some merit in the connective tissue principles, it has little to do with the structure of the penis, which is no less-complex than joint structures but more complicated in other ways. The sensory system in the penis being subject to huge strains as applied to gymnastic stretching would be unacceptable and the complex lymphatic and vein systems also would suffer monstrous damage.

You said yourself that Pumping was delivering to much too fast, well if you hit the gym with too much it’s the connective tissue, attachments and insertions, tendonitis and even the nervous system that buckles, too much force and to quick a growth will lead to injuries, similar but different.

I’m not one to believe in extenders, to me they follow the principles of sticking things in ones ear to enlarge the whole, constant tension works for dull tissue (earlobes I don’t mean to offend the ADS guys). But I think hanging can bring about such change in structure so fast that the body rebels against it and toughens up and you don’t have the pain receptors in the tunica to tell you are going too far.

We are talking of stretching the tunica mostly (and some of the suspensory ligaments the further you stretch them the further down the penis will point while erect), which is akin to the fascia around a muscle (similar but different, in this case two layers, sometimes one, sometimes three), when you strain a muscle attachment it is generally where the fascia is connecting to the tendon seldom where the tendon attaches to the bone (if that happens it generally lets go).

So go now to the tunica which is built to contain the corpus cavernosum and spongiosum, as the pressure builds, not a structure that is meant to support us hanging from a branch (such as the elbow and its muscle groups) and as such no pain receptors to indicate it’s time to let go of the branch, however we’ve all had those erections so hard they hurt as the nerves pick up on the pressure we feel ouch and the system will at some point back off the pressure.

I guess what I am trying to say is be careful, don’t try to apply to many of those weight training (and stretching) principles to PE. I have been lifting heavy for nearly thirty years and training people for twenty, it’s a completely different game.

Kindest regards
Behemoth

I’m wondering where you people get those ideas about plastic deformation, fatigue, healing etc.. Also I find pretty ridicolous this denegating the effectivity of extenders and trust in hanging, where there are way more people showing convincing proofs of gains through extenders that there are people showing proofs of gains thanks to hanging. All the proof people who hangs have to offer are pretty much just words, often big words, incredible claims intrinsecally not believable - like ‘I have hung 8 hours daily and gained 2” in 3 months but I’m not going to show my pics because it is against my religious beliefs’ or something along this line.

It is hard to fight beliefs with facts.

Plastic deformation is an engineering term, it simply means stretching something beyond it’s ability to spring back. Fatigue, as I understand it, simply means the point at which you really feel your penis cannot take the weight any more - how it relates to the process beyond that is harder to see. Healing, seems obvious.

I’ve certainly not come across any posted evidence for extenders that shows more than the newbie burst. After that burst, the majority of posts I see talk about no gains from extenders. Maybe I’m missing the overwhelming evidence. Hanging is extenders on steroids. If you think extenders work, it would seem to indicate that you think hanging with low weights for long periods works.

Those aren’t newbie burst and they are among the best picture evidence of gains ever posted
My gains (start 1-1-2007)
Cantlook’s Progress Pictures 2012

There are other threads showing analogous gains through extenders, the above are just the first I can remember right now.
I can’t think of any hanger showing such clear pictures, despite hanging having been ‘sold’ for ten years or more as the ultimate length technique.

>>Hanging is extenders on steroids.<<
Not to sound harsh, but only somebody who has no experience with both techniques can make such a statement. Hanging is the primitive and naive approach to prolonged steady tension, exenders are the enlightened and modern approach.

Hangers believe high tension is the way to go, and what they get is a temporary, elastic deformation that will snap back to the original size leaving them with mainly a stronger tunica. Penis is living tissue, is not a piece of metal to which you can staunchly transfer the engineering concept of ‘plastic deformation’. The problem with hanging is that sets are too short, cyclic forces are known to have more a strengtheing effect than a ‘deforming’ effect on connective tissue. Having tried both techniques, so having no bias on this topic, I can tell that extenders have a higher chance to give permanent gains than hanging. This accords also with what we know about connective tissue properties.

Plastic and elastic deformation are not only engineering concepts. They are biomechanical concepts as well and (I really do not intend to sound pompous/arrogant here, but don’t know how else to say this) my knowledge of these concepts comes from eight years of college culminating in a masters degree, two certs for training - one of which is a CSCS, study in various books and research, years of experience training both sporting and physique athletes - along with MANY average joes, and my personal experience playing college football, strength and conditioning training for ten years, and competitively powerlifting. These are well-understood concepts relating to connective tissue. Plastic deformation happens when connective tissue is stretched so far that it cannot return to its original size. It is a function of total stretching workload - time spent stretching X intensity of stretching. (That is very simplistic but more or less accurate) Owing to that equation, I DO see how extenders can work. You maximize the time side of the equation while tension remains essentially constant. Hanging, on the other hand, does clock considerable time, but the amount of intensity it can generate cannot be matched, so the total workload is much higher. Note: overworking can lead to injury, the process should be a gradual ramping up of both time and intensity.

Now, connective tissue does become tougher, but no place in the body does it ever become impossible to stretch with increased intensity or time. Plus, hangers have come up with all kinds of creative ways around this problem like angles and fulcrums.

And a question for Marinera: has Bib ever posted proof of his massive gains? I thought of exactly what you were saying about proof before. Pics or it didn’t happen! ;)

@Behemoth: you are totally correct that more is involved in lengthening the penis than simply stretching the connective tissue, that is the reason that any good program will address the circulatory system, soft tissue fatigue, the muscles of the pelvic girdle, etc. (I know I REALLY need to add kegels!) But, in terms of what is the major limiter and number one target for length gain being that no bones are present, it is the connective tissue of the penis. The suspensory ligaments and the fibrous sheath of connective tissue - the dreaded tunica! And the rules for deforming connective tissue, no matter where in the body, are essentially the same with some slight variance between joints, membranes, and attachments.

And the thing about lifting not being a great comparison is spot on as well, they are completely different processes and similarities are largely coincidence. It almost makes me think that some people think the penis is a muscle when they talk about how in some way you need to exercise in the same manner you do when you are in the gym hittin’ the pile.

Lastly, @memento: dynamic stretching/elastic deformation is useful, but does not cause permanent increases in connective tissue length, hence the “elastic” - it stretches and the. Springs back to its former size, like elastic. That being said, dynamic stretching is GREAT to prep/warm-up connective tissue, and when done before static stretching has been shown to reduce the rate of injury and increase the effectiveness of the static stretching. So some swings when I am ready for them (can perform them safely) are probably a good idea. Thanks for the suggestion!

Wow! Great discussion all! Did not expect this when I started the thread. Thank you.

I would vote for more time hanging but am admittedly biased.

The trick is to not be the kind of hanger that marinera speaks of. Do not pursue heavy weights. As DomXZ mentions, hang as light as possible to reach fatigue at the end of the day. An increase in overall hang time will actually allow you to reduce weight. And split sets are most certainly the way to go.

I don’t have enough experience with extenders to play the “which is better game” or to comment on a combination routine.

The bottom line for any PE routine is “if you are getting gains, don’t change it”.