The Elevator Exercise

The elevator exercise is a great way to start learning some of the other techniques if you know the basic kegel, but feel “stuck” like that’s all you’re able to do.

If you already know how to do a basic kegel, you know how to pull your pelvic floor up to contract your vagina, which is a great start. But how do you learn to squeeze your sides horizontally, or do even fancier moves like twisting and tilting?

What the elevator exercise does is it helps you gain more control and precision over your pelvic floor muscles, building that connection between those muscles and your brain so that your brain can start telling your muscles to activate in other ways.

All you need to know for this exercise is your basic kegel contraction.

Try it right now and pay attention to how those muscles move when you do it. What you are doing is raising your pelvic floor UP. Be careful to not go too hard on this or you can strain yourself. There’s plenty of time to build strength little by little. For now you want to just practice the movement.

So with the elevator exercise, you’re doing this contraction movement little by little until you’ve finally raised your pelvic floor as far up as it goes. You’re going to imagine that there is an elevator right at the bottom of your vagina. 

Relax your muscles completely by taking a deep breath in and exhaling. You can feel those muscles settling lower when you do this. This is going to be your “ground floor.”

Then, carefully contract up as high as you can. Remember to breathe! That upper limit will be your “top floor.” Now relax and go back to your “ground floor.”

Now that you have your ground floor and top floor, you’re going to try and split the contraction into as many “middle floors” as you can. At first, you may only be able to do “2 floors”, so you contract up halfway, hold it for a second, contract up fully, hold it for a second, and go back down to the halfway level, hold, and finally relax completely so that your vagina is back at the “bottom floor.” 

When I first started, 2 floors was all I could do, because 1) I couldn’t contract as high, and 2) my muscles didn’t have as much precision, but as I practiced more and more I can now split it up into 7 little incremental contractions from bottom to top.

So since this is all vertical, what does this have to do with squeezing, which is a horizontal movement? There’s no actual concrete way to learn squeezing– a lot of people who have trained themselves report that one day they were just able to do it. But I think that training the precision of my contractions really helped my brain get in touch with those muscles, and from them on, I was able to use them in other ways.

I’ll make another tutorial on squeezing, but if you don’t have that ability yet, keep practicing your elevators! As always, please be kind to your body, don’t go too hard, don’t do this for too long, and don’t forget to breathe. This should not be painful and if you’re experiencing pain or pelvic floor dysfunction please see a medical professional!