Blog / The body
Squeeze, hold, release
Three words that describe one movement. Most women learn the first, hold the second badly, and skip the third entirely, which is why the whole thing so often disappoints.
Almost every instruction a woman receives about her pelvic floor concerns the squeeze. Tighten, lift, hold, repeat. The other two parts of the movement barely get named, and the result is a generation of women who can grip beautifully and cannot let go.
This page takes the three parts separately, because they ask for different things and improve at different rates.
The squeeze
Smaller than you think. That is the whole instruction, and it is the opposite of what most women were taught.
A quarter of your available effort is the working range. At that intensity the deep pelvic floor muscles do the work and the surrounding muscles stay out of it. Push toward maximum and the glutes, inner thighs and lower belly all join in, which feels like more but is actually less. You cannot train a muscle precisely while three others are covering for it.
Precision matters more than force here. A lift you can feel clearly, in one place, at low effort, is worth more than a whole body clench at full intensity.
The direction matters too. This is a lift upward and inward, not a squeeze together. The image that works for most women is of something being drawn gently up toward the heart rather than clamped shut.
The hold
Two breaths. Occasionally three. Rarely more.
Long holds seem more virtuous and they are not. Past a few seconds, most women stop holding and start bracing, and a braced pelvic floor stops communicating with the diaphragm. You can tell this has happened because your breathing changes, gets shallow, or stops entirely.
That relationship between breath and pelvic floor is the thing the whole practice depends on, so anything that breaks it is working against you. If you cannot breathe normally during the hold, the hold is too long or the squeeze was too strong.
Watch your jaw during this part. If it tightens when the pelvic floor does, the body is recruiting help it does not need, and softening the jaw usually makes the whole movement cleaner.
The release
Longer than the squeeze and the hold combined, and the reason anything on this site works.
Take a slow count of six at minimum. Let the descent be gradual rather than a switch flicking off. And then, when you believe you have finished, continue. Almost every woman finds another layer underneath the one she assumed was the bottom, and that extra layer is where held tension lives.
Controlled descent is considerably harder than controlled ascent. A pelvic floor that can lower under control is one that can also let go completely on request, and letting go completely is the capacity that makes sensation, arousal and comfort possible.
The rule that follows from all of this: never end a set on a contraction. Always finish with a release, and follow the last release with a stretch of stillness.
The whole movement, once
Feet flat, belly soft. Exhale and lift at a quarter effort. Hold for two breaths, breathing normally. Then release across six slow counts, and keep releasing after the six.
Do it once, properly. That is worth more than twenty done briskly, and it is the entire technique.
When the release will not come
Some women find the letting go simply is not available. The lift happens, the hold happens, and then the floor stays partly engaged no matter how much they ask it not to.
That is common and it is information rather than a fault. It usually means the pelvic floor is holding at rest, carrying a low grade engagement all day that has become invisible through familiarity.
If that is you, stop practising the squeeze for a few weeks. Work only on release. The long exhale, sound, weighted rest and gentle rocking, all described in the exercise guide. Adding contraction to a body that is already contracting does not help it, and there is nothing to be gained by being diligent about the wrong half.
Come back to lifting when the release feels genuinely available, and you will find the lift itself has improved in the meantime without being practised.
Why an egg makes the difference
All three parts can be practised with nothing at all, and doing so is worthwhile. What a yoni egg adds is feedback.
Without something present, a woman is relying entirely on her own proprioception in a region where most of us have very little. She thinks she is lifting. She thinks she has released. With an egg in place, the difference between thinking and knowing becomes obvious, and the most common discovery is that the release was shorter and shallower than it felt.
The perineal lift is the most precise version of this three part movement, working from a specific point rather than the floor in general.
How much, how often
Six to ten repetitions is a set. One set is a session. Three or four sessions a week is plenty.
More is not better and there is a real ceiling here. Pelvic floor work at high volume tends to produce tension rather than tone, which is the opposite of the goal. Six good repetitions with a long release after each will do more over three months than a hundred rushed ones will do in a week.
And keep ending on the release. If you remember nothing else from this page, remember the order and remember what comes last.