5 ways to attain maximum sexual pleasure

The Orgasmic Woman is a self-help programme that can train women to have more sexual pleasure, says its developer, Swiss psychotherapist Annina Sartorius.

She devised the sexuality course together with a tantric guru. It blends yoga exercises and meditation with elements of psychotherapy and hypnotherapy.

"If you take time to play the piano, and you play every day for an hour, wouldn't it be even more important and central to a woman's life to take an hour a day to train for her sexual pleasure?" Annina asks.

Her three-month Orgasmic Woman programme is based on Komaja's tantric yoga, developed by her colleague, Bosnian-born guru Franjo Milicevic, known as Makaja.

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1. Muscles

The training can be done by any woman on her own. If she has a partner, if she wants she can also include him," Annina told Love Matters at the World Congress for Sexual Health. "We call one part of the training 'erotic power training', with exercises the women do every day."

The main aim of the exercises is to strengthen the pelvic floor muscles and learn to control them. "These muscles are very involved in our sexual pleasure feelings, and especially orgasm feelings," says Makaja. And the muscles can get weak, he says -- especially if you spend your days sitting in an office.

2. On the bus

One yoga exercise to build them up is called vajroli mudra -- and you can do it every time you go to the toilet, says Annina.

"You start to urinate, and then you stop it in the middle of the flow. And by doing this you contract these muscles which are part of the pelvic floor muscles. You do this exercise several times a day."

But you can also secretly practice the same squeezing movement sitting on the bus on the way to work, she adds. "And of course you can then use it in your lovemaking!"

3. Vagina

As a psychotherapist, Annina also took elements from other techniques.

"Like the mirror exercise from cognitive behavioural therapy, for instance. The woman is asked to take a small mirror and just take her time and get to know her vagina.

"And then there are elements from hypnotherapeutic techniques, like taking a picture of the woman as a queen, to empower her to go further into sexual pleasure and finding herself."

4. Sexual satisfaction

But does all this yoga and finding yourself really have any effect?

To find out, the developers carried out a study on 80 women who followed the programme, plus a control group who did no training. They assessed the results using the Female Sexual Function Index, one of the most common tests to grade women's sex lives.

"We got significant results," Annina says. "After the programme the women had a significantly more satisfying sexual life, in the components of sexual desire, arousal and satisfaction."

5. Happiness drug

When most people have intercourse, it lasts just a few minutes, says Makaja. "But imagine if you have intercourse for an hour! We're conditioning the centres in the brain to produce much more 'happiness drugs'. Even during the day they continue to produce them."

"So we can be on drugs without being on drugs!" says Annina.

If for Annina training for sex is like practising the piano, Makaja has a more athletic comparison: "Anyone can go to the sea and swim a little bit. But if you want to swim like a water polo player, you have to train!"