Originally Posted by Alhowaidi
What do you mean low pressure for long periods is heat or weight !
Due to previous request, I’m gonna try to post a simple layman version of this and not get too technical.
Basically, there is a difference between living and dead tissue in testing. Most of the studies that look into tendon stretch use dead tissue in a lab which is almost always soaked in some type of liquid to prevent it from drying out. In the dead tissue, there is no live coordination between cells to perform the function. They are just testing the basic mechanical properties of the tissue. In a living organ like the penis, there there are all sorts of mechanical and biochemical signals being passed between cells to prevent failure and lasting damage.
So, in terms of simple mechanics of the basic tissue, without any living cellular response, the literature says that the most important aspect of permanently stretching the tissue to the point that it doesn’t simply go back to its original length, is to stretch it VERY slowly. We are talking about 0.5 to 1.0% or 1-2mm per minute. Contrast this with traditional PE like manual stretches and jelqing that apply so much force so quickly that we are seeing initial strain rates often more than 15,000 times faster than that, or like 150-300% per second. The tissue that we are stretching is viscoelastic whether dead or alive, meaning that in simple terms it has certain behaviors like your child’s silly putty. Take a piece of that putty and roll it into a cylinder. Grab each end and pull apart very swiftly. You’ll notice that it snaps in half with relatively minimal distortion of the putty on either side of the break. Now do the same thing, but pull apart at a more medium speed. It still breaks in the middle, but the putty stretches quite a bit on either side before it breaks. Now finally do the test again, but this time pull apart VERY slowly, like 1mm per minute. You will be able to reach a point where your arms cannot spread further apart, but the putty still hasn’t broken. Also, you’ll notice in these tests that the faster you pull, the more muscle it takes to break it.
Viscoelastic materials like those in the penis, respond to a rapid stretch by turning very stiff and resistant to distortion. But if you apply the same load much more slowly they remain more fluid and they essentially re-mold themselves to accommodate the stress. Interestingly, there is going to be a sweet spot when talking about PE. There were studies done on living cow tendons where the scientists wanted to see what happens microscopically to a tendon depending on how fast it is stretched. The intentionally stretched the tendons until they ruptured, but did it at different speed; 1% per second and 10% per second. Keep in mind that these speeds are still 60 to 600 times faster than what I’m suggesting for PE. Anyway, what they found was that in both cases the tendon ruptured, but the faster one experienced less damage. It simply broke in a clean line without much distortion of the tissue on either side of the break, just like the silly putty. At 1%/s rate, the tendon had a lot of microscopic damage along the entire tendon before it snapped, again just like the silly putty.
Now the rat tail studies and others have used MUCH slower stretch, and found that even getting as high as 0.16% per second results in a stiffening of the tissue and more microscopic damage, but significantly less so if you slowed down to 0.016% per second (i.e. 1% per minute). So it is really important to perform the stretch VERY VERY slowly. This will allow the tissue to re-mold itself to accommodate the stress without damage.
Secondly, they’ve found that if you heat the tissue before and during the stretch, that there is even less damage and more possible stretch at much lower load (weight). More important, is that when you combine very slow stretch with heat, you get permanent stretch of the tissue without damage. So why am I saying there is a sweet spot? Because we are trying to keep the cells as healthy as possible. Other studies have shown pretty conclusively that if you stretch the tissue at the optimal weight for 30 minutes, you body releases a bunch of chemicals that speed up the healing process, but if you go more than 60 minutes, it triggers the cells to start self-destructing (called apoptosis).
So we are trying to create a protocol that uses low weight (like 1kg) over a long time period (like 20-30 minutes) with some external heat (like a heat lamp or rice sock) to get the penis most of the way to max length without stressing it out at all. Then using ultrasound to get the internal tissues up to 41C we are then trying to stretch the tissues very slowly (1mm per minute) past the previous BPFSL limit (about 2-3mm past) and hold it there for some time and allow the stress to relax on its own. Once the stress has relaxed, we take away the heat and let the tissue cool in an stretched condition. Then we want to do this again a couple more times if possible, adding another 1mm or so to the stretch each time, still very slowly. But we have to make some compromises in terms of how many cycles we do in a single session because we ideally want the heaviest weight about 30-40 minutes into the session, and we don’t want the whole thing including final cool down to take longer than 60 minutes.
Finally, even though the studies showed that if you heat the tissue up and go slow enough you can literally stretch the dead tissue like 20-30% beyond the normal limit, this isn’t even close to realistic for living tissue. Even if you go slow and hot enough to get through the typical elastic limit at around 2.5-4% beyond the previous BPFSL, you will have to start pulling REALLY hard and things will start to get REALLY painful because the nerves don’t adapt that quickly. So really, the physiological limits are going to be about 3-7mm of excess stretch before you give the body a chance to at least partially heal.
