have you heard of edging well today
we're going to talk all about it Pros
cons and is it safe I'm Dr Rena Malik
urologist and pelvic surgeon and if
you're new here make sure you subscribe
and share the Channel with your friends
edging is described as orgasm control or
trying to essentially get to the point
of climax and then preventing orgasm to
delay the active orgasm this can be done
by yourself or with a partner and can be
incorporated in many different kinds of
sex including oral anal or penetrative
intercourse so why do people do it and
what are the pros well number one is to
potentially increase pleasure so the
thought of doing edging is that as you
delay orgasm it builds up the tension
and allows a bigger release when an
orgasm essentially does occur causing
increased pleasure number two it can
offer a way to kind of enhance your
connection with your partner if you're
doing it with a partner it allows you to
kind of explore together and potentially
even time your orgasms to occur at the
same time which may bring joy to a
partner and allow for increase intimacy
number three it can be a learning
process so using edging can allow you to
really see what sort of stimuli are very
pleasurable versus what are less
pleasurable and allow you to understand
your body better and really obtain more
information about what causes you to
reach orgasm and what you can do to help
prevent it next it can allow you greater
control so some people really want to
have control over how long they can
delay orgasm for allowing for a longer
period of intercourse and potentially
more pleasure for both themselves and
their partner as I described earlier and
lastly we often prescribe something
similar to this for men with premature
ejaculation I've made several videos on
premature ejaculation so make sure you
check those out but essentially
premature ejaculation is ejaculating
before you or your partner wants to
causing distress and this usually
happens within the first two minutes of
intercourse so the stop start method is
essentially when you feel that you're
about to achieve climax you stop for 30
seconds and then you resume sometimes
you can also add a squeeze where the
partner squeezes the glands or head of
the penis to help kind of prevent
reaching orgasm and then you go back to
it so how well does it actually work
well the data we have is from the
premature ejaculation data it hasn't
been studied really well in people using
edging for pleasure purposes or people
who just want to try something new so
there's one really interesting study
that looked at 36 couples and I divided
them into two categories one is the
traditional stop start method which is
often discussed and described by
urologists to teach patients how to
prevent premature ejaculation another
was other techniques to delay
ejaculation without having to stop
sexual activity to kind of allow it to
continue which is what I imagine many
people are using when they're doing
edging at home so they first explain
what happens during sexual excitation
there are a few things that our body
does when our bodies are getting excited
prior to the point of no return or about
to have climax first of all the tension
in your muscles increases that can be in
your abdominal muscles your pelvic floor
muscles your gluteal muscles they're all
increasing in tension your respiration
starts going more and more rapidly often
people are thrusting their pelvis more
aggressively often people are very
focused on the sensations that they're
occurring that are causing sexual
stimulation as well as increasing the
rapidity of their pelvic thrust and
overall just having more pleasure so the
way to essentially prevent Climax from
happening is to increase the length of
this sexual excitation phase so they
describe a couple things in this study
that you can do to help prevent early
Climax and one of these is to actually
do some abdominal breathing or belly
breathing or diaphragmatic breathing
essentially because during sexual
excitation as I mentioned previously
there is an increase in how fast you're
breathing and usually you're using kind
of your chest rather than your belly so
focusing on abdominal breathing will
also relax the muscles a bit so they're
not so tense all this time also trying
to focus on extending the pleasure with
moderate intensity rather than going
hard and fast trying to kind of slow
down and appreciate what you're feeling
and enjoying the journey and not just
focusing on reaching climax and they
really stress that you shouldn't try to
distract yourself from the sexual
stimuli by thinking of something not
sexual because that can really cause a
lot of discomfort and anxiety during the
sexual encounter and is really not
actually adding to the experience in
this 36 couples they measured their time
to ejaculation or intra-ejaculatory
latency Time by using a stopwatch they
ask the female partner to measure the
start of inner chorus till the
ejaculation time and they did it before
the treatment then after the treatment
and then three months later and what
they found was that pretty much before
they were all less than a minute to
ejaculation and what they found was that
after doing these exercises or doing the
stop start method people were able to
extend their intra-ejaculatory latency
time up to seven minutes meaning they
were able to go from less than a minute
to seven minutes before reaching climax
so certainly it does work and certainly
offers some potential for increased
pleasure but what are the cons of edging
so some of these I've talked about in my
last video on masturbation techniques
that might be ruining your sex life one
of these is it may cause blue balls so
blue balls is what we call epididymal
hypertension and the reason for this is
that when you're having arousal blood
flow increases to all the pelvic floor
muscles including those that are near
the testicles and all this increased
blood flow usually is released when you
reach a climax but when you don't reach
a climax the blood flow hangs around and
then causes this heavy pressure
discomfort feeling which many people
call blue balls and so this certainly
can happen when you're edging the second
thing is idiosyncratic masturbation so
if you're doing a lot of edging
specifically with masturbation it can
lead to you getting really used to that
specific form of stimulation a hand or
even for women using toys can become
your preferred way of masturbation so
this can make it more difficult to
climax when you're with your partner
because a vagina may not cause as firm
of a grip as a hand or a penis may not
offer the same sort of stimulation that
a vibratory sex Aid would and so lastly
the other problem is this can lead to
some delayed ejaculation difficulty
reaching climax or just overall
dissatisfaction so when you're trying to
reach climax right you're aroused you're
into it and if you stop doing whatever
that activity is it can reduce arousal
making it more difficult to then reach
that same level of arousal again for
some individuals and so in that case it
can lead to frustration discomfort and
essentially a lot of pressure because
now you feel this pressure to perform
and climax at the time where your
partner is waiting or when you're trying
to reach climax it's really important of
course if you're going to participate in
edging with a partner that you talk
about it make sure you're both on the
same page and you're both consenting
adults and want to proceed that way and
lastly I want to cover a couple small
questions that people ask me about
edging so how long should you edge for
well well I think really it depends on
you individually there's no right or
wrong time as I mentioned previously and
other studies that have looked at forms
of edging for premature ejaculation
they've seen that it extends intercourse
by about seven to nine minutes so is
that a reasonable amount of time
certainly most people I would say
probably go to the half an hour mark if
you're spending lots and lots of time
edging to enhance your pleasure as long
as it's not starting to interfere with
your daily life your quality of life
your overall happiness there's really no
problem in doing whatever you enjoy but
if you find that you are constantly
engaging in edging or you're starting to
have discomfort or feeling sort of
tension all the time in the pelvic floor
while this is extremely rare I'd
certainly see some people who come in
who just have chronic pain down there
because they've been doing a lot of
edging and so I would say if you're
feeling okay and you're living your life
and you're happy and you and your
partner are happy there's really no harm
in engaging in it last question I often
get is what happens to that semen if you
don't ejaculate like is it gonna back up
in your body and the end answer is no
nothing's gonna happen if you don't
ejaculate either your body will reabsorb
the semen or you will ejaculate at night
time and have a nocturnal emission if
you want to learn more about nocturnal
emissions in an entire video about that
so make sure you check it out as always
I hope you enjoyed this video and
learned a ton and always remember to
take care of yourself because you're
worth it