PE and No Fap Journal

I’ve decided to dedicate some time to semi-regularly journaling my progress. After a year long hiatus from PE I started with the beginner routine again and measured 7.25" BPEL x 5.25" EG after about a month. I’m going to put some serious effort into PE and quitting porn, and I think keeping a journal will help me with accountability. My long term goal is to get to 8" NBPEL x 6" EG while improving EQ by quitting porn.

Welcome and best wishes on your journey.

DL

Welcome back to the routine. Wish you the best and hope you can be encouraged to quit porn. Great starting stats already man!

I guess I’ll start off by writing why I’m quitting porn and what it has to do with PE. There’s plenty of good reasons but my main one is it’s killing my EQ. I’m in my early 20’s and rarely wake up with morning wood and don’t get very strong erections. I plan on seeing a doctor to get bloodwork done but the cause is most likely porn related. Another reason to quit porn is that it is slowing down the gains that I can make with PE. Often times I will have to skip a PE session because I beat my dick up too much watching porn. Lastly, I plan on being a father one day and don’t want to be using porn as a father. The longer I wait to quit the harder it’s going to be so I might as well quit now. Writing down the reasons to quit porn helps because I can come back to these when I am having a porn craving.

Now here is the PE routine I plan to follow while trying nofap:
5x/week: 5 minute hot wrap, 3x 20 minute hangs (5lbs), warmdown
Each week I will either increase the weight or volume of hangs. I won’t be jelqing or doing manual stretches for the next 60-90 days. Once I get a decent nofap streak I will carefully add these back in and see how my EQ changes. I also won’t be getting hard to measure so progress will be measured with BPFSL. I measured today at 7 1/4" BPFSL so this is my starting point. I hope to post updates here at least 2x per week.

Stay strong bro! Quitting porn is hard. I don’t beat myself up for my slips but i know what it’s like being addicted and losing EQ due to porn. You can come up with a lot of justification but in the end, you have to choose turning your back to it and choosing whats ahead and that may mean choosing your future daily to find yourself farther from it. Celebrate your victories.

no fap is a great tool to go on with life. Without masturbation you gain focus and dopamine receptors start to heal, this means a more positive mind and more decision-making attitude.

Once I was like you, if not worse, severely addicted to porn, I remember not skipping a day of masturbation in 3-4 years.
In the end, I discovered that porn really messed up with the front part of the brain, the decision-making part, and it’s also for this reason that is hard to quit, you have to actually make a decision.

Do P.E. if that helps not fapping (like training so hard that you can’t physically masturbate) or it’s neutral, but if it’s counter-productive I suggest fixing addiction and then the other.
Best luck!

10/15/23
I woke up with morning wood today. I think that’s a step in the right direction. I did try and maintain a hard on by fantasizing about porn. The justification I used was that it didn’t count since I wasn’t actually looking at porn, just thinking about it. This is wrong because I am still engaging in a form of escapism that is damaging to my mental health. I will try and repeat that to myself next time I have that craving.

I did 4x 20 min hangs (5.5 lbs). I’ve been leaving the wrap on between sets. 5-10 min hot wrap before/during sets. I measured right after the 3rd set and was pretty close to 7 3/8" BPFSL. I think I’ll start measuring once a week from now on. I did one extra set today. We’ll see tomorrow if it was too much volume. 8" is staring to feel like a realistic goal.

10/16/23
No morning wood today. Had a lot of work today so not too many cravings. I’ll call this day 1 of the streak. My best streak is about 80 days. Short term goal is to make it through the week. Also decided to quit smoking weed for a bit. I’m a little worried trying to kick too many bad habits might make it easier to relapse but I think I can process cravings better when I’m not high. We’ll see how it goes.

4x 20 min hangs (5.5 lbs) today. One in the morning, two at lunch, and one in the evening. It’s hard when hanging to get a stretching sensation in the right spot, or at least what I think is the right spot. In the past I wasn’t very good at keeping a log so this should help so I can see if I’m making regular progress. I’m not sure if I want to do 2 full off days or 2 lighter days, or even just hang 7 days a week till I need a break.

10/18/23
Didn’t have time to post yesterday. Don’t think I had morning wood yesterday or today. Was too busy yesterday to have too many cravings. Only had time for 3x 20 min hangs. Today I tried to work up a full erection because I thought it would be cool to start documenting progress with pictures. Didn’t watch any porn, just used stimulation. I wasn’t able to maintain a full erection long enough to take a picture with a ruler. Part of the issue could be the ruler is metal and the sharp edges hurt when I press it into the pubic bone. Fair to say though no real change in EQ. Probably gonna be a few more weeks until I start to see improvements.

Did 4x 20 min hangs with 5.5 lbs. I probably don’t have time to add more sets so on Friday I’ll bump up to 6 lbs. Or maybe I’ll wait until Sunday and re-measure before adding weights. Last summer when I started hanging for the first time I was too afraid to go over 5 lbs. That may have been why I stopped seeing progress. I think another short term goal will be to hit 7.5" BPFSL by the end of the year. That’s about .02" per week which seems doable. Might also look into an ADS to wear in between since I tend to do some in the morning and some at night.

Anecdotal comments seem to run 50/50 between "cold turkey/major lifestyle change" and "taper off slowly."

Tapering seems easy and logical, but I found it was hard to stick to the progression; it just extends the suck. Cold turkey sucks much worse, but change happens rapidly enough I feel like I’m making progress. Might be the other way around for you.

Try one - maybe flip a coin - and see how it works. If one doesn’t work, try the other. If neither work, try one of them again. The second time, you’ll know what you’re in for, and it’s easier to deal with it. You can’t always be successful the first - or even the second - time; just because you failed doesn’t mean you should give up.

10/20/23
Took 2 days off from PE exercises. Had a bit of a scare Wednesday night right after my last set of hangs. After un-doing the wrap I typically try to get some blood flowing right away with some light dry jelqs. This time however, I couldn’t get any blood flowing. Like at all. I tried doing kegels+jelqs to see if that would help but the best I could do was a semi, but absolutely no blood would stay in the head. I tried to tell myself that I had probably just overworked it a bit, but I panicked and decided to look at porn to try and work up an erection. Thankfully, that worked and I got a full normal looking/feeling erection. Unfortunately I thought to myself "what the hell, I’m already hard" and jerked off.

Obviously I’m a bit bummed about ending a streak so soon, but I am very thankful that no serious damage was done as far as I can tell. This is a huge lesson that PE can be dangerous if done wrong and I should take time to recover and have rest days. This was on Wednesday and I believe I had been hanging at 5.5 lbs since Friday of the previous week. So that would have been 6 days in a row. From now on I’ll be sure to not hang more that 3 days in a row without a rest day.

Also should note, until I took the wrap off after my last set, which was my second set in a row (with a 10-15 minute break) I did not experience any pain/indications that anything was wrong. Another possibility is that the hot wrap I used was too hot. I accidentally put my hot pack in the microwave for a bit too long and it’s possible that might have had something to do with it. Again I didn’t experience any pain or burning feeling from the hot wrap, it was just a bit hotter than usual and could have numbed my penis or something. Lastly, I left the wrap on in between my 3rd and final set. This also may have had something to do with it. Maybe the wrap was too tight. In the future I will take the wrap off in between sets.

Thanks AndyJ. I’ve tried no fap in the past and have learned from experience that breaking bad habits takes a lot of energy. A lot of people, myself included, usually try to change a bunch of things all at once the first time they try and quit porn. For example, eating healthier and going to the gym AND quitting porn. That doesn’t work out very well since overcoming porn cravings takes a lot of mental energy. Changing too many things at once is very taxing and it’s only a matter of time until I get a porn craving and don’t have the mental energy to fight it. As far as quitting porn, the goal is to go cold turkey as in no looking at porn, no masturbating, and no sex (for at least 90 days). My focus is breaking the worst habit first which is porn and then gradually making other life changes once I start a decent streak and cravings are less frequent.

10/23/23
Taking today off from PE. Tomorrow I will start hanging at 6 lbs. Taking Thursday and Friday off last week seemed to be necessary. I had much better EQ over the weekend and have had morning wood since Saturday. I even had trouble hanging because I kept getting hard before I could finish the wrap. I managed to do 2 sets on Saturday and three sets on Sunday. I think I’ll measure every 2 - 4 weeks. I want to measure semi-regularly so I can get an idea of if I’m making progress. But I also don’t want to measure too frequently.

Also starting day 4 of the no fap streak today. Looking forward to making it to a week. I think that the routine of PE is helping me quit porn. It feels like an outlet other than porn for my sexual energy. I realized that while hanging over the weekend. I should be looking for healthier outlets and things other than porn to put my energy and focus into. Once I make it a week my goal is to go a month.

10/24/23
I relapsed last night. I was on autopilot and started looking at porn without trying to stop myself at all. I need to be more careful when I’m on my phone at night. I should probably work on a night routine where I stop using my phone at a certain time and unwind before bed. Maybe that will help me get better sleep and make it harder for me to relapse on autopilot like that. I just read a post today about how there is some anecdotal evidence that you can gain faster while doing nofap and PE at the same time. Add that to the list of reasons to quit. I also picked up smoking weed again. I figured I have a few more months until I need to pass a drug test, and read somewhere that cannabis can be a natural anti-inflammatory and thought that could be useful for PE.

I did 4x 20 min hangs at 6 lbs today. I really felt the fatigue but was able to do all four sets without issue. I’ve started to add a cooldown after sets because it’s supposed to cement any gains you made while hanging. I also measured right after the 4th set and measured 7.5" BPFSL. This won’t count as an actual measurement since it was right after doing PE, but it’s cool to see that progress is being made again. Looking forward to hitting the 8" mark for the first time. I guess the first goal is 8" BPFSL, and then to hit 8" BPEL, and finally go for 8" NBPEL.

We are all human and with that comes imperfection. But to find a routine for putting the phone away before bedtime is good, not only for PE, but for quality sleep and recovery.

Regarding your measuring routine, I’m thinking the same way. Focus on the metrics that are closest to a even number, no matter if it’s in inches or centimeters. Then you always have something fairly close to aim for.

Good luck!