Exercise and working out is good for a lot of things, your sex life included. Too much working out, on the other hand, could actually do more harm than good. Here we uncover the reasons why your workouts can both increase the quality of sex you experience and decrease your desire to get it on.
Why Working Out is Great for Your Sex Life
Working out and getting in regular exercise definitely does something for the way you feel about yourself. Losing weight, toning up, and improving your health are all great reasons to stay motivated to work out. In case you needed one more, you can add experiencing better sex to your list of reasons to keep getting your fit on.
There’s actually a link that’s been proven between sex and exercise. Perfect, right? When you work out, the brain produces endorphins that release sex hormones. It’s actually a very similar release of hormones when you work out and when you have sex, so the more frequently you can produce these endorphins (be it through sex or exercise) the more likely you are to become sexually aroused.
5 Ways Exercise Can Improve Your Sex Life
1. It Gets Your Blood Flowing
While it might not be something you think about, the blood flow throughout your body has a lot to do with your sexual response. That feeling you get when you’re aroused is actually your erectile tissue filling with blood. For the guys, erectile tissue is external (in the penis) and the ladies have internal erectile tissue (in the vagina).
Getting regular exercise helps to keep the blood flowing throughout your entire body, something that comes in pretty handy the next time you’re feeling frisky. When your blood is flowing, it is much easier to feel genital arousal. Keep your body moving and your blood will get flowing to increase your sexual satisfaction.
Exercise also stimulates genital arousal in other ways. While it might not sound very erotic, exercise is responsible for activating the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), something that is directly related to sexual arousal. One study concluded that women that exercised for just 20 minutes were more aroused when watching a suggestive movie than those that didn’t exercise at all.
2. It Promotes Relaxation
Have you ever noticed how hard it is to get aroused when you’re feeling stressed out? Stress basically kills your sex drive and we’ve all been there. Exercise, however, helps your body deal with daily stress. If you’re like a lot of people who feel the daily demands of life in the forms of anxiety, depression, and sleep disorders, exercise can help by training your body to more effectively deal with these stressors.
Anyone who exercises regularly finds that after a good workout, it’s much easier to relax. The endorphins produced through exercise have a way of minimizing stress and offer your body and mind room for relaxation. When we’re living without stress, it’s much easier to get in the mood and feel that amazing sexual release.
3. It Improves Your Self Image
The correlation between the way you feel about yourself and your sex life is huge. It’s pretty hard to feel like having sex when you don’t feel sexy. Getting regular exercise can do wonders to improve your self-image and is excellent for making you feel desirable. Being physically active can make you feel like a sexual god or goddess and is fantastic for boosting your self-esteem.
Body image greatly influences sexual satisfaction. When you exercise regularly, it’s more likely that you’ll feel good about the way you look, especially the way you look while having sex. When we feel good about ourselves, it’s much easier to not only become aroused, but to feel sexier when with our partner.
4. It Enhances Sexual Arousal
With all that blood flow and body glow that exercise brings on, it’s easy to see why getting regular exercise can seriously enhance sexual arousal. Blood flow to the genitals is a huge aspect of your desire to get it on and with exercise you know that your blood is flowing to all the right spots.
With exercise also relieving stress and depression, you’re much more likely to get aroused than if you were just sitting around stagnant. If you’re experiencing a less than desirable sex drive, try some exercise to see how amazing it really is for increased sexual arousal and your desire to get busy.
5. It Improves Stamina, Strength, and Flexibility
We all know that sometimes (if we’re lucky) sex can last a long, long time. In these magic moments, it’s vital that we’ve got the stamina, strength, and flexibility to keep going and try new positions. Exercise is something that will improve your stamina so you can last longer, increase your strength when you need it most, and make you more flexible for all those positions that require your body to bend in positions you’re not used to.
You’re probably aware that the more you exercise, the better exercise feels. Sex is an exercise all its own and the more physical exercise you get, the better your sex life will be. Knowing just how good exercise is for sex, you might just be ready to hit the gym right now. Knowing what exercises enhance sexual pleasure can take your love-making to an entirely different level.
Exercises for Better Sex
Just as there are different ways to have sex, there are different exercises that will benefit your sexual pleasure. Not only will the following exercises make you feel healthy and strong, but will also improve the way you do things in the bedroom. Stamina and flexibility, anyone?
1. Core-Strengthening Exercises
When people refer to “core strength”, they’re really talking about strength in your middle and lower back, abdomen, and pelvis. It just so happens that these areas are all used when we engage in sexual activity.
Exercises to strengthen your core include crunches, planks, torso-twists, bridge, and more. Getting in the habit of adding core-strengthening exercises to your regular workout routine will definitely benefit in the bedroom.
2. Cardio
Cardiovascular training (think running, hiking, and swimming) helps to accelerate endorphins, get your heart pumping, and gets your blood flowing. Sound familiar? Regular cardiovascular exercise will not only keep you healthy and strong, but will keep you going in the bedroom with its innate ability to increase endurance and stamina.
3. Upper-Body Work
There’s no doubt that good sex takes amazing upper body strength. When you take the time to work on your upper body, you’ll have the strength you need in positions that require you to do so. There’s a ton of different exercises that will help strengthen your upper body. Free weights, rowing machines, push-ups, bicep curls, and more will all help give you the upper body strength you need when it matters the most.
4. Yoga
As one of the most amazing disciplines for both body and mind, yoga is a gentle exercise that will allow you to connect deeper with your senses as you engage in sexual activity. The balance and calm that yoga brings is awesome for heightening sexual pleasure and the flexibility it offers will come in handy when exploring new positions with your partner.
There is nothing better than the feeling of pure sexual satisfaction. Whether you’re in a relationship or are just hooking up for a one-night stand, exercise can be extremely beneficial for the way you experience it. Adding exercise to your regular routine will make you feel sexy and aroused, build your strength, and lead you to better sessions every time you hit the bedroom (or anywhere else you’re getting busy). There are certain yoga posess that will improve your sex life.
Why Your Workouts Might Be Hurting Your Sex Life
There is no doubt that working out will make you feel sexier, but it can actually decrease your libido as well. That’s right, getting your workout on can actually decrease your desire to get it on with your partner.
This might come as quite a surprise. You would think that all that working out that’s making you look and feel sexier than ever would make you want to have sex even more, but it turns out that this isn’t always the case. If you’re dedicated to working out, you might find that you’ve lost the dedication to your sex life. What gives?
Here are a few reasons why your workouts may be doing your sex life more harm than good.
Fatigue
Many of us work 9-5s and if we want to fit a workout in, it’s usually going to be before or after work. Hitting the gym after work can put us home later than usual and by the time we’re tucked into bed, we’re usually too tuckered out to get intimate with our partners. Even if we’re only working out a few days a week, these busy schedules can still leave us seriously exhausted and in no mood to do much of anything, but fall asleep before we have to get up the next day and do it all over again.
While working out is great for increasing our energy, it can also leave us exhausted by the end of the day. For those who get up early to work out before heading off to the daily grind, the last thing on their minds when they get home several hours later is having sex. If you’re juggling work, work-outs, a personal life, and a relationship, sex may just be coming in dead last on your list of priorities.
Overtraining
For some people, working out becomes something of an obsession and many tend to end up working out too much or completely overtraining for upcoming events. While we all know that exercise is really, really good for us, too much of it can end up being really, really bad.
Overtraining can affect both men and woman, with those who are training too hard also often losing it when it comes to their libido. Exercising too much, it turns out, can lower your number of sex hormones, which in turn can seriously lower your libido.
Most women that work out are showing signs of a drop in hormones. Missed periods are a tell-tale sign of too much training, as many women athletes are familiar with this common symptom. Along with skipped periods, a lowered sex drive is often experienced. When too much exercise comes into play, hormone imbalance is something all too common.
In men that take to hitting the gym a little too hard, the signs that their sex hormones have diminished is not so apparent. While women can count on a missed period to tell them something is wrong, men don’t have such an obvious signal. In men, it is levels of testosterone that end up dropping when there is too much working out involved and when testosterone drops one’s sex drive does as well.
There are many people that take their training to an extreme level and certain types of exercise that might take a person to a state of exhaustion. There is no doubt that consistent, high-intensity workouts can be extremely beneficial to health and physique, but when taken to the extreme can have severe consequences and a low-libido is definitely one of them.
When people reach this state of overtraining, they run the risk of affecting the blood levels of certain important neurotransmitters; such as dopamine, 5HTP, and glutamine. Low levels of these neurotransmitters may cause depression and chronic fatigue, two things that tend to put a damper on one’s sex drive.
Overtraining to an extent of exhaustion can also affect one’s thyroid function, particularly the hypothalamic-pituitary axis. This may lead to hyperthyroidism, a condition that has a number of negative side effects including a lower sex drive. It is also known to cause depression and weight gain. The bottom line is that thyroid health is important for a healthy libido and too much exercise can pose serious risk to thyroid health.
Overtraining and Adrenal Fatigue
Not only can over-training disrupt thyroid health, but can significantly impact adrenal health as well. Healthy adrenal function is something that is extremely important for a healthy functioning libido, but when adrenals become imbalanced it can lead to a seriously diminished sex drive.
With stress being one of the primary reasons for a decline in adrenal function, chronic stress as a result of overtraining could very well be linked to problems with the adrenal gland. When adrenals aren’t functioning normally, it disrupts hormonal balance which in turn can lead to a decline in one’s sex drive.
While overtraining itself won’t lead to adrenal depletion, the stress that accompanies it will. If your libido is lower than you (or your partner) would like, it could very well be due extreme overtraining induced stress that has led to adrenal fatigue.
Putting Your Workout in Front of Your Partner
If you’re putting your workouts before your partner, you’re definitely not alone. These days, exercise is everywhere and sometimes has the power to interfere on the intimacy factor quite a bit.
While we all want our partners to look and feel their best and we know that exercise is really good for them, we don’t want them leaving the house before its light every single morning so they can get a workout in.
It isn’t uncommon for you or your partner’s workout routine to become priority over everything else. Sometimes a two mile run three mornings a week can quickly turn into four or five days a week. Let’s not forget about the twenty-mile weekend runs either.
Whether it’s running, training for a marathon, or becoming a cross-fit junkie, there are many spouses that are losing their relationships (and their sex lives) to the rigid exercise schedules of their partners.
Finding a Balance
There are more people than you might think that are putting exercise in front of their partners. For many of these people, exercise becomes their new sex life or relationship, leaving their significant other frustrated in more ways than one.
The key to finding that blissful middle ground where workouts are enhancing your sex life and not hindering it is to find a balance with your workouts. Too much can obviously be a bad thing, while too little will keep you stuck with little sexual interest.
Know that regular exercise will make your sex life something to brag about, but too much regular exercise can have the opposite effect. Finding a balance between the two will make you look and feel amazing both in and out of the bedroom. And if you need any reasons to have sex every day,