Can you do too many kegels?

Published 9 September 2026.

Yes. And the sign is that you can't fully let go.

Every other muscle tells you when you've overdone it. This one stays quiet. There's no ache the next morning, nothing to see, nothing to feel from the outside. The feedback you'd get from a bicep or a hamstring never arrives, and men keep adding volume because nothing told them to stop.

What replaces it is release quality. If you contract and then can't return to where you started, if the floor stays partly switched on, that's the one to act on.

What too much actually looks like

Four signs, and fatigue is absent from all of them:

• An ache in the perineum, between the testicles and the anus, or after sitting a while
• A sense that you never fully relax down there
• Hesitancy, a slower stream, dribbling after you've finished, or feeling like you haven't emptied
• Symptoms that get worse when you do more

That last one is the tell. A muscle that's undertrained improves with volume. A muscle that can't release gets worse with it, and the natural response, I must not be doing enough, takes you further in.

The doses that have actually been used

Dorey's programme was three contractions in each of three positions, twice a day. Milios's high-volume arm did a hundred and twenty. Both were supervised, both were taught in person first, and Prostate Cancer UK's own guidance still says, in three words, "don't overdo it."

Nobody has run a trial on overtraining the male pelvic floor. Trials of pelvic floor training after prostate surgery report no adverse events, but they weren't looking for them, and a study that doesn't ask doesn't find. So what follows is reasoning from how the muscle behaves. It is the same reasoning a pelvic health physio uses, and it carries the weight of reasoning rather than of a trial.

The mistake most men actually make

A man on r/AskMenOver30 started kegels, added squats and Romanian deadlifts, added pelvic tilt stretches, and then developed dribbling. He wanted to know which one caused it.

Nobody can tell him, including him. Four changes at once, one symptom, no way back. If you're going to add volume, add one thing and give it two weeks.

If you think you've overdone it

1. Cut the volume in half. Halving it works better than stopping.
2. Rest longer than you hold. Most men resting three seconds after a ten-second hold are the ones who end up here.
3. Add deliberate release work. Full lengthening, no bearing down, for at least as long as the contraction lasted. If you've never trained the release, this is the change that matters.
4. Give it two weeks before judging it.

When it's something else

If exercises hurt, if there's pain in the perineum or after sex, or if the urinary symptoms have been there a while, stop and see a pelvic health physiotherapist. A non-relaxing pelvic floor is a recognised condition in men. It's treated with release work, and it needs someone who can examine you.

More squeezing is the wrong prescription for it, and doing more is the most common way men make it worse.

Men who've already tried kegels and got nowhere are disproportionately in this group: a hold that's fine, a release that isn't. The Performance System measures both before week one and moves the extra work onto whichever one is the gap.

See what's in the Performance System

The free 7-day plan gives the release its own day and states what the evidence behind it does and doesn't cover.

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