Reverse kegels, and the half of the training nobody teaches
Search the term and you will find forum threads, a few videos, and almost nothing with a source attached. The instruction that does exist is usually a sentence telling you to bear down gently, which is both vague and easy to do wrong.
Meanwhile there is a clinical literature on pelvic floor release in men. It is small, it has real limitations, and almost nobody in this category connects it to the term.
The instruction that goes missing
A muscle you can only contract is a muscle you half control.
Standard pelvic floor instruction covers one direction: shorten the muscle, hold, end the hold. The return to full resting length gets treated as the absence of a contraction. It is a skill of its own. For most muscle groups that assumption is harmless. Here it is the source of a specific and common problem.
A pelvic floor that sits at a raised resting baseline can produce a strong squeeze on demand. It can look fine on every home check. And it can be a significant part of why ejaculatory control is poor, because the muscle is already partly engaged before anything begins. Prescribing more contraction work into that state adds to the problem.
That is the case where the release side matters more than the squeeze.
There is a male clinical literature on the release side
Three papers, all from the same Stanford group, all in the Journal of Urology. They studied myofascial trigger point release combined with a specific relaxation training method, in men.
Anderson, Wise, Sawyer and Chan, 2005, 174(1):155-160. 138 men with chronic prostatitis and chronic pelvic pain syndrome that had not responded to conventional therapy, treated for at least one month.
Anderson, Wise, Sawyer and Chan, 2006, 176(4 Pt 1):1534-1538. 146 men, mean age 42, with refractory chronic pelvic pain syndrome. This is the one that measured sexual function specifically.
Anderson, Wise, Sawyer, Glowe and Orenberg, 2011, 185(4):1294-1299. 200 men with a median symptom duration of 4.8 years, treated with a six-day intensive protocol of daily three to five hour sessions.
What those studies found
Anderson 2006 is the one that does the work for this page, because it is the one that measured sexual function rather than pain alone.
At baseline, 133 of its 146 men had some sexual dysfunction: ejaculatory pain in 56%, decreased libido in 66%, and erectile and ejaculatory dysfunction in 31%. After treatment, Anderson 2006 reports the specific sexual symptoms improving by an average of 77% to 87% among responders, meaning those above the 50% improvement level, with 70% of patients reporting clinical success overall.
Anderson 2005 treated 138 men for at least a month.
Anderson 2011 ran a six-day intensive with 200 men and followed 116 of them for a median of six months.
Both are case series in the same population, and both report improvement in the same direction on pain, urinary symptoms and overall response. Their outcome figures are left out of this page deliberately: they measure pelvic pain, and setting them beside the sexual-function numbers above would make the evidence look broader than it is.
What those studies do not show
Two limitations, and both of them change what you should take from the numbers above.
They are case series with no control arm. Nobody was randomised, there was no sham condition, and the men referred themselves. In that design you cannot separate the treatment effect from regression to the mean, from the effect of sustained clinical attention, or from the expectations of men who sought out an intensive programme. The authors describe them as case series, and so does this page.
The population is chronic pelvic pain. Every man in all three studies presented with pain. The 2006 paper measured sexual symptoms within that population, which makes it the closest thing available, and it still tells you about men whose primary complaint was pain.
The step from there to "release work improves ejaculatory control in men without pain" is an argument. It is a reasonable one, because the mechanism is the same muscle in the same state, and it remains an argument. It has not been tested, and this page is not going to present it as though it had.
The mechanism, and where it was imaged
The diaphragm and the pelvic floor move as a coupled pair. Talasz et al., 2011, in the International Urogynecology Journal, imaged it with real-time MRI: both structures move downward on inspiration and upward on expiration, with amplitudes measured through quiet breathing and through coughing.
That study looked at eight healthy volunteers and all of them were women. It is the reason breath-paired release instruction exists, and it is a small imaging study in a female population. No equivalent imaging in men turned up in the sources reviewed for this page.
The same qualification applies to the broader clinical description of a non-relaxing pelvic floor. Faubion, Shuster and Bharucha, 2012, in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, is the review most often cited for the condition, and it is written about women throughout.
So: the mechanism is described and imaged in women, and the male evidence is three uncontrolled case series in men with pain. That is the actual state of it.
Which side of this are you on
A rough guide. It is not a diagnosis.
Signs pointing toward a weakness problem: you cannot produce a contraction you can feel, you cannot hold one for more than a few seconds, and you have no pain anywhere in the area.
Signs pointing toward a tension problem: aching or discomfort in the perineum, the pelvis, or after sitting for a long time; a sense that you never fully relax down there; symptoms that get worse in periods of stress; and no improvement or a worsening from doing more contraction work.
If the second list describes you better than the first, more squeezing is the wrong prescription and a pelvic floor physiotherapist is the right next step. If the training you are already doing hurts, stop.
What to do with that
If you are training the contraction and have never deliberately practised the release, add it. Full lengthening, without bearing down hard, for at least as long as the contraction lasted. That is a small change and it costs nothing.
If the tension list describes you, get assessed before adding volume of any kind.
The free 7-day plan gives the reverse motion its own day, and states there, as here, what the evidence behind it does and does not cover.