At 4” girth, I suspect you have not done PE before. If you have read the Important Newbie Threads/Info, or CLAMPING Everything You Ever Wanted To Know you will know that starting your PE journey with clamping is both dangerous in the short-term and counter-productive in the long term. I’ll explain that a little more:
Because of the extreme forces involved with clamping, to clamp an unconditioned penis is analogous to going into the gym for the first time ever and trying to bench press 300lb because that’s what you’ve seen other gym members doing. The likelihood of injury (ranging from minor damage to a vein, which creates a weak spot that tends to keep coming back and requires a prolonged layoff, but is not permanent - many of those of us who are extremely seasoned and heavily conditioned clampers have had these - to a tunica rupture which can cause permanent damage) is extremely high.
The danger is primarily from the amount of pressure created above the clamped area, so as long as the clamp is wide enough and the wrap substantial enough so as not to cut into the skin (which is a different type of injury!) the actual design of clamp makes no major difference to effectiveness or to the chance of injury. Any clamp will work equally effectively if it restricts/cuts off blood-flow. There is a slight safety margin with the standard ‘Cable Clamp’ which most clampers use; it has the advantage of being able to be completely released in an instant if you feel any impending problems (which come on very fast with clamping). Cable Clamps are also inexpensive :)
Because collagenous tissues in all their forms toughen and strengthen remarkably quickly in response to high levels of stress as a protective mechanism to try to avoid damage, clamping also causes rapid toughening of the tissues, making all less stressful methods of PE extremely hard to gain from. This is an immutable physiological response of collagen to stress; it cannot be avoided. You should therefore exhaust the girth gains to be had from normal jelqing, Orange bends, Ulis and Horses before you even think about clamping, or you will considerably reduce your ability to gain long-term by toughening up the tissues while you still have your starting girth. You then have to use ever higher pressures or amounts of time to produce any further gain, at which point the chance of injury increases - not only the chance of injury, but the chance of the worst sort of injury, as you are now using very extreme pressures at which tissue failure can occur without warning.
Unfortunately, I learned the hard way. I tried clamping after my first 6 months of PE (so was already well conditioned but had not exhausted gains from other methods), and after getting 1/16” or so of permanent girth from it, my gains ground to a halt. Because of the toughening, nothing would get them going again. I took 6 months off as a deconditioning break, but when I returned to PE (and clamping again almost straight away) I got gains for a brief time before they stopped again, due to rapid re-conditioning. I had to take a full year off then start very slowly with a progression of manual exercises which got gains going again.
Good PE is about doing ‘just enough’ to stimulate growth, but not enough to cause conditioning any more rapidly than it will naturally happen. Clamping certainly has its place, and is effective (and I love clamping!), but its place is as a last option, when everything else has been tried and gains are hard to come by because of your conditioning level. Once clamping gains slow, the only viable option is an extended de-conditioning break, followed by starting the whole PE process again.
