How to Tighten Vaginal Walls Naturally
Your body changes as you get older. It’s a natural part of the ageing process. One of those changes can be a loosening of your vagina. This can have a serious impact on your confidence and emotional wellbeing, and even cause problems in your love life and other relationships.
But don’t worry. There are plenty of ways to tighten your vagina, from simple exercises to high-tech electronic toning devices.
What is vaginal tightening good for?
Tightening your vagina can work wonders for your sex life. Working on your pelvic floor can improve lubrication and increase sexual pleasure for you and your partner. It can also help prevent stress incontinence, reduce infections from things like bacterial vaginosis and help to limit vaginal atrophy (where the vaginal walls become dry and irritated).
What causes vaginal looseness?
A loosening of your vagina as you get older is perfectly normal. It happens to us all. As your body gets older, it produces less oestrogen. Oestrogen is the hormone that helps your vagina stay elastic, so when your body makes less, your vagina gets looser.
This is especially apparent during the perimenopause and the menopause itself, as the hormones your body produces change significantly. Your pelvic floor and vaginal canal become looser and weaker, which is why you might have symptoms like bladder and bowel control issues.
And if you’ve given birth, your body has been pushed to its limit to support a growing child. During childbirth, all the muscles along your vaginal canal expand to make room for the baby. They do an incredible job of contracting back, but childbirth very often weakens the vaginal walls and causes a looser vagina.
How can I tighten my vaginal walls?
The good news is there are several ways you can tighten up your vagina, ranging from equipment-free exercises to invasive cosmetic surgery. Not every technique will work for every vagina, so it’s worth experimenting, and if you’re really struggling speak to your doctor.
Cosmetic surgery
Cosmetic surgery can seem like the easy option. A quick operation, a bit of recovery and everything’s back to normal. But there’s no clear consensus among scientists and clinicians as to whether surgery is actually effective, and it brings with it risks like bleeding, pain and a prolonged recovery period.
While there are situations where it may be your best option, like repairing damage from childbirth or a vaginal prolapse, these are fairly uncommon. Your doctor will advise you whether surgery is a good idea for you.
Vaginal wall tightening exercises
So if surgery isn’t a solution, what do you do? Well, you could start by trying some exercises. There are several techniques, but one of the most popular is kegels. They’re a series of exercises designed to help you strengthen your pelvic floor muscles and tighten your vagina.
There’s no cost to trying kegels, and for some women, strengthening exercises can be all that’s needed. If you want to tighten your vagina they’re a great place to start. But they won’t work for everyone. Some women need a bit more help for their situation.
Vaginal tightening devices
If you want more support and feedback while you work on tightening your vagina, there’s a whole range of pelvic exercisers to help you out. Each different device has its own way to let you know when you’re doing the exercises right (and, just as importantly, when you’re not) and give you something to work against.
Vaginal weights
For many women, vaginal weights are just what’s needed. They take the guesswork out of kegel exercises, and some even give you different weights to move up to as you get stronger. They’re completely safe to use, and relatively cheap to buy. You might even be able to get them on prescription or VAT free.
Electronic pelvic floor devices
Electronic devices like the Kegel8 Ultra 20 V2 are more expensive than weight sets, but they really do take working your vaginal muscles to the next level.
It works your pelvic floor and vaginal canal much more efficiently than it’s possible to do with weights or manual exercises alone, and can deliver amazing results in as little as 12 weeks.
How to use exercise to tighten vaginal walls
You don’t need any equipment to do kegel exercises to tighten your vagina, and they’re pretty simple to do. Why not give them a go right now?
- Lie down with your knees slightly apart. If it’s more comfortable for you, try sitting in an upright position or even standing up.
- Gently tense your pelvic floor muscles. If you’re having trouble locating them, imagine you’re trying to stop yourself from passing wind – you should feel the muscles contracting around the anus.
- Once you’ve done this, tense around your vagina – this should feel like you’re trying to stop a wee.
- Squeeze both areas at the same time. The sensation should feel like you’re squeezing muscles towards your belly button.
- Hold for five seconds.
- Relax for five seconds.
- Repeat this cycle five times. Don’t worry if you can’t do it five times – you’ll gradually build the pelvic strength over time.
Now, the theory behind these exercises is simple. But actually getting them just right, so you see a real improvement, can be trickier. There’s no feedback other than what you can feel, and if you don’t know how you’re supposed to feel that can be really hard to judge. And that’s why kegel weights are so useful.
Kegel weights
Kegel weights are pretty simple. You slip them into your vagina, then you use your pelvic muscles to lift them up - just like you would at weights at the gym. They give your vagina something to grip, and some resistance to work against.
The great thing about Kegel8 balls is their special wand. This stops you from inserting them too far into your vagaina, and lets you see whether you’re doing the exercises right (you’ll get full instructions with your weights, but you want to make sure the want moves down when you tense - this means you’re pulling the weight up).
If you’ve tried manual exercises and you’re not sure if you’re quite getting them right, or you’ve not seen any improvement yet, kegel weights are a great next step.
Why do manual exercises often fail?
Manual exercises to tighten your vagina - with or without weights - can be a brilliant solution for some women, and some situations. But they don’t always work, for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, they can be tricky to get right. 50% of women push down instead of lifting when they do kegels, which isn’t just ineffective - it can actually damage your pelvic floor muscles. The indicator wand on Kegel8 weights means you know if you’re doing this, but it can still be tricky to get the technique just so.
It’s also difficult to target the different muscle fibres (fast-twitch and slow-twitch separately. You get no objective feedback on whether you’re improving and you’ll need to dedicate at least 15-20 minutes every day to doing your exercises. That might not seem like a lot, but it’s easy to drop off after a few weeks when you don’t see results straight away.
Electronic pelvic exercisers
And that’s where electronic pelvic exercisers come in. You get detailed feedback on what you’re doing, programmes tailored to what you want to achieve, and some programmes only need a few minutes a day to start seeing results.
The Kegel8 Ultra 20 uses gentle neuromuscular electrical stimulation to work the muscles in your pelvic floor and vaginal canal, which means it can target both fast and slow-twitch muscle fibres in the same programme. And don’t worry if that sounds painful - it’s really not. It can feel odd at first, like a tingling or buzzing sensation. You’ll definitely know that something is happening. And you’ll get used to it as you work through the programme.
Because you’re not actually doing the exercises yourself, there’s no danger of getting them wrong, which reduces the risk of damage. Although you might find you ache afterwards as if you have done a workout. That’s completely normal - the device is just working the muscles for you.
The Kegel8 Ultra 20 v2 was developed with Amanda Savage, who is a leading pelvic floor specialist and women’s health physiotherapist. She helped with the design of the exerciser itself, and also with the different programmes that are included.
Kegel8 Ultra 20 v2 electronic pelvic exerciser
Can a topical oestrogen help to combat vaginal looseness?
Topical oestrogen can improve the quality and resilience of vaginal tissue, but it won’t tighten your vagina in the same way that exercises or an electronic device can.
What it does is support the thickening of the vaginal epithelium (the inner lining of your vagina), increase collagen levels and improve blood flow and hydration. All of these contribute to healthier, more elastic vaginal tissue, and topical oestrogen can really help with laxity symptoms like a reduced sense of dryness, irritation or lack of support.
If you’re postmenopausal then it can be a big help in keeping your vagina healthy. Your body is producing less oestrogen, and topical oestrogen application helps to redress this balance. It can be a useful complement to manual exercises or an electronic device but it won’t fix a loose vagina by itself.
Conclusion
Your vagina gets looser as you get older, and after events like childbirth. That’s a given. But that doesn’t mean you just have to put up with it. There’s plenty you can do to tighten your vagina, and keep it that way.
Manual exercises are a great start. For some women they’re all that’s needed. But they might not work for you, and that’s fine. If that’s the case then you can try kegel weights, which give you more resistance and some guidance that you’re actually performing the exercises right.
Electronic pelvic exercise devices like the Kegel8 Ultra 20 take out all the guesswork, and work your muscles super efficiently. If you want clinically proven results fast, they’re your best option.
But the most important thing is that you don’t have to just suffer in silence. There are ways to tighten your vagina without resorting to invasive surgery. It’s just a matter of finding the right one for you.
