The gym is supposed to make you a better version of yourself. Stronger back, bigger arms, better heart. Nobody signs up for deadlifts expecting to develop erectile dysfunction. And yet, here we are.
Personal trainer Toby King told the New York Post that the muscles surrounding the pelvic floor play a direct role in erections and arousal—and hammering them with heavy, high-tension lifts without adequate recovery can strangle the blood flow and compress the nerves that make all of that work. “If they are constantly tight or overloaded, then they can restrict the blood flow and compress nerves that are essential for healthy sexual function,” King said.
The exercises doing the damage are the ones already in your rotation. Squats, deadlifts, ab rollouts, hanging leg raises, planks, leg presses. Every time you brace under load, the pelvic floor fires with you. Do that five days a week, pile on stress, and skip recovery—and that muscle group eventually stops cooperating. King used this example: treat your biceps the way most men treat their pelvic floor, curling every day with zero rest, and watch what happens. The muscle quits.
Cyclists and triathletes face their own version of this. Long rides on a poorly fitted saddle put sustained pressure on the nerves and soft tissue in that region, compounding the problem session by session.
The Warning Signs Your Workout Is Affecting Your Erections
The warning signs aren’t just in the bedroom. Pelvic pain, discomfort during sex or masturbation, ejaculation pain, bladder issues, daily tightness—these are the downstream results of a chronically overworked pelvic floor. “A lot of men are walking around constantly braced,” King said. “They tighten during lifts, they’re often tight all day too, and over time, this creates an overactive pelvic floor.”
Bad form and poor breathing accelerate the damage. “If your form is off and you’re not breathing correctly, then that pressure has to go somewhere, and often it ends up in the pelvic floor,” King added.
The fix, counterintuitively, involves doing less—not more. King recommends dialing back exercises that load the groin, inner thighs, and deep hip muscles while symptoms are present. Breathing work, glute stretches, child’s pose, and happy baby are the unglamorous antidote. And don’t do standard Kegels; for men with pelvic tightness, those can actually worsen erectile dysfunction. Reverse Kegels, or pelvic floor drop exercises, are a better call—using deep diaphragmatic breathing to release tension rather than build it.
Pelvic floor physical therapist Tia Dankberg, a board-certified clinical specialist at Brooks Rehabilitation, told the Post that treatment rarely stops at the pelvic floor itself. “No muscle in the body works in isolation,” she said, noting that her interventions typically involve extension-biased movements alongside improvements to rib cage mobility and hip flexibility.
The smartest move is seeing a pelvic floor physiotherapist before the problem compounds. “You could have a problem with tightness, weakness, the muscles not relaxing and working as they should, or a mixture of all three,” King advised. That’s a real diagnostic, not a Google rabbit hole.
Train hard. But know what you’re actually training.
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