Electro-stimulation of the vagina may sound scary, but it’s actually pretty magical, with a number of benefits for your body, sexual functioning, and health.

The vagina is held up and supported by the pelvic floor muscles, which can become weak over time from childbirth, heavy lifting, and just getting older.

This is where electo-stimulation comes in. A wand device with metal pads, when in the vagina, gently sends an electrical message to your muscle fibers, telling them to contract and relax, contract and relax. You can barely feel it, and yet it’s giving you a work out in such a crucial but often underworked muscle group.

Here are the major benefits:

1) Stronger pelvic floor

Electro-stimulation has shown in research to be as effective as other modalities at strengthening the pelvic floor muscles. And having a strong, well-functioning pelvic floor has myriad benefits to our sexual and overall health.

In addition to supporting your vagina, the pelvic floor also holds up other internal organs including your uterus, bladder, and intestines. It also controls the flow of urine, supports pregnancy and childbirth, assists in penile erections, ejaculation, vaginal arousal, orgasm, and works with abdominal and back muscles to support the spine to keep you standing.

So from keeping you upright to keeping you orgasming, the pelvic floor is something that is super important to keep in good health and function. The trick is, we can’t see our pelvic floor like we can see other muscles, so they are easy to not think about until symptoms of a weak pelvic floor show up, including incontinence, reduced sexual arousal, and infrequent or wimpy, low-power orgasm.

Electro-stimulation by way of the vagina can be helpful in pelvic muscle training as both treatment, and prevention, for weakening muscles.

 2) Increased sexual satisfaction

With the connection between electro-stimulation and stronger pelvic floors, and the connection between stronger pelvic floors and sexual functioning like erections, ejaculation, vaginal arousal, and powerful orgasms, it’s no surprise that study participants who use vaginal electro-stimulation report more sexual satisfaction than the control group.

We need more research to parse out the particulars and measure direct impact on orgasms, but we know the pleasurable contractions you feel during an orgasm is the pelvic floor in action, and increased sexual satisfaction sounds like a major benefit to me!

3) Decreased vaginal pain during sex

Dyspareunia is the catch-all medical terms for painful sex. And painful sex is an awful, and awfully common experience.

Weekly electo-stimulation of the vaginal opening and inside the vagina over a period of 10 weeks was found in one study to significantly decrease vaginal pain. Many of the participants who had stopped engaging in vaginal intercourse because it hurt so much were able to return to penetrative sex again after electro-stimulation treatment.

 4) Certainty that the exercise is being done correctly

What I especially like about the concept of electro-stimulation for the pelvic floor is that it does both the contracting, and the relaxing. The relax part of the exercise is just as important as the contract part, because a tight, tense pelvic floor can be painful and just as unhelpful as a weak one.

But when we do pelvic floor exercises, also known as Kegel exercises, on our own, it’s easy to focus more on the squeezing part, vs. the full complete exercise that the electro-stimulation does for you.

Whether your pelvic floor muscles are too weak to do a Kegel on your own, or you tend to be too tense with the clenching, electro-stimulation takes out the work and allows you to passively perform this exercise correctly.

 - Dr. Jill McDevitt