SEXERCISE: Exercising Your Way to Better Sex

By Jason Karp

Sex and exercise are the best physical expressions of who we are, arising from the same primal source. The two activities are deeply imbedded in our evolutionary history, and are so important that a lack of either hurts our physical health. Through sex and exercise, we fulfill our destiny as physical beings.

Using the latest sexology research, Sexercise stimulates your mind by exploring the intimate relationship between sex and exercise and stimulates your body with exercises and workouts for better sex, accompanied by photographs and detailed descriptions of sex positions that will test your fitness. It also answers all the exercise- and sex-related questions you're too shy to ask.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781543994353

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 Jason R. Karp

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying, and recording, and in any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author or publisher.

Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases, including corporate promotions, fundraising, or educational purposes.

Notice: The author and publisher specifically disclaim all responsibility for any injury, liability, loss, or risk, personal or otherwise, that is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents of this book. Before starting any exercise program, please obtain the approval from a qualified medical professional.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by BookBaby

Editing by Jack Karp, MFA

Images by Jamie Dickerson of J.Dixx Photography

ISBN: 978-1-09830-355-6

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-54399-435-3

BookBaby

7905 N. Crescent Blvd., Pennsauken, NJ 08110

Printed in the United States of America

Also by Jason Karp

The Inner Runner

Run Your Fat Off

14-Minute Metabolic Workouts

Running a Marathon For Dummies

Running for Women

101 Winning Racing Strategies for Runners

101 Developmental Concepts & Workouts for Cross Country Runners

How to Survive Your PhD

To my parents,

Muriel and Monroe,

for having sex one steamy morning and making twins

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreplay

Chapter 1: A Brief History of Sex and Exercise

Chapter 2: Exercise and Your Sex Life

Chapter 3: Workouts for Better Sex

Chapter 4: Sexercise Questions Your Mother and Coach Never Answered

Happy Ending

References

Index

About the Author

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been published if not for the following people. Included in my heartfelt acknowledgments are…

Grace Freedson, my literary agent. Thank you for all the opportunities and connections you have made for me. I don’t know what you thought when you first received my book proposal on exercise and sex, but I am grateful you didn’t tell me it was a stupid idea. It has been 12 years and nine books since I received your letter in my mailbox offering to represent me. Thank you for taking a chance.

Jack Karp, my twin brother and favorite writer and editor, for your editorial work on the manuscript and for all the jokes about writing a sex book. You held me accountable, making sure I backed up everything with research. You inspire me every day to view writing as art, and to relentlessly work at the craft until I get it right. Your editorial skills and thoughtful comments took me in a different direction and shaped this book into something worthy of publication.

The staff at BookBaby, for creating an alluring book that provides a provocative exercise and sexual experience.

Jamie Dickerson of J.Dixx Photography, for your amazing photographic skills that stimulate the mind and the body.

Amy Lowe and Dr. Justin Mih, for serving as the beautiful and handsome models for the book, and for joking around and smiling throughout the photo shoot. I am grateful for your openness to experience and appreciate you asking to be sprayed down with water only 99 times during the photo shoot.

Missy Lavender, Dr. Alexandra Myers, and Monica Olivas for sharing your expertise and insights about women-specific sex issues, and Andrew Danly for your insights about what sitting on a bike seat for hours at a time does to a man’s parts.

And my readers, for appreciating the power and effects that exercise and sex have in our lives.

Foreplay

Exercise and sex are intimately connected to each other and to our world. They are the oldest physical activities. Both are integral to human survival. Long before the beginning of modern civilization, our ancestors ran through woodlands and prairies, chasing wild animals to feed their families. Running, especially being able to run far and fast, was very important. Without running , there would be no food for the family. And without sexual intercourse , there would be no future family.

Humans start having sex relatively early in their lives. According to the Kinsey Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, males in the U.S. start having sex at an average age of 16.8 years and females start at an average age of 17.4 years. By age 18, 60.2% of males and 59.6% of females have had sex.¹,² Research has shown that both exercise and sex are good for our health.³,⁴ And the more of each we get, the better. Studies show that body image, which is enhanced with exercise, plays a vital role in sexual desire and satisfaction.⁵,⁶ But the benefits of exercise and sex transcend our sexual satisfaction and physical health; they connect us to who we are.

Sex and exercise both connect us to our bodies. The human experience is physical, and sex and exercise are perhaps the best expressions of our physical being. To live life fully, we must fully live on a physical level. Sex and exercise are so intimately connected to our bodies that a lack of either hurts our physical health. Perhaps that’s because, through sex and exercise, we fulfill our destiny as physical beings, and on the foundation of a sexually fitter physical being, we can build a better life.

Sex and exercise both connect us to people. Through sex, we form a deep connection with our partner and, through exercise, we understand what it means to compete and to cooperate. We exercise in gyms, in the park, in communities with friends who share their stories, who confide in us, who introduce us to other people to do business with, to make friends with, or even to marry and have sex with.

Sex and exercise both connect us to love. Sex is our vehicle to evoke and manifest love for someone, to experience deep intimacy with someone, to be vulnerable with someone. Exercise is our vehicle to evoke and manifest love for ourselves, to experience deep intimacy with our physical being, to be vulnerable with ourselves.

As marathon world record holder Paula Radcliffe ran the 2007 New York City Marathon, she chanted to herself, I love you, Isla. I love you, Isla, as she pulled away from the competition to win. Her daughter, Isla, was born ten months before the race. Paula’s love for her daughter is what pushed her during the New York City Marathon. The reason it did so gets to the core of who we are. What really drives us to be physically active—running being the most primal of all physical activities—is the need to feel human. Like exercise and sex, love also connects us to that primal feeling of being human. The emotions tied to sex and to all-out physical exertion not only are interconnected, they come from the same internal source. And when we exercise and when we have sex, we don’t just experience exercise and sex, we become them. We become human.

Exercise and sex require beautifully complex, simultaneous, and continuous orchestrations of psychological, hormonal, vascular, and neurological factors acting in concert. Sexercise explores the physically intimate relationship between exercise and sex—how exercise affects our sex lives and how you can exercise your way to better sex. It even answers the questions you may be too shy to ask. Over the last two decades, our society has become more sexually open—gay characters on sitcom TV shows, celebrities broadcasting their transgender status, unisex bathrooms in restaurants. It’s good to talk about sex. Doing so helps us to understand ourselves.

I hope that Sexercise ignites your libido, makes you sexually fit, and enriches the way you think about how the two best expressions of our physical being affect each other and affect who we are.

Chapter 1

A Brief History of Sex and Exercise

W hy do peacocks have ornate feathers? I asked my eighth-grade teacher on a school field trip to the zoo.

To attract the female peacocks, she responded.

Her answer was pretty close. Charles Darwin, whose theory of natural selection became the primary tenet of evolution—that traits or behaviors that increase a species’ fitness survive, while traits or behaviors that do not increase a species’ fitness do not survive—also believed that characteristics evolve not just because they confer some kind of environmental advantage (i.e., they increase a species’ fitness), but also because they confer a reproductive advantage. Darwin called this sexual selection. In other words, the peacock’s fancy feathers evolved to ensure its reproductive success by providing a competitive advantage to attract peahens. As Darwin wrote, Sexual selection depends, not on a struggle for existence, but on a struggle between the males for possession of the females; the result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring. Thus, while natural selection favors traits or behaviors that increase a species’ fitness, sexual selection benefits mating. Darwin elaborates in The Origin of Species:

Thus it is, as I believe, that when the males and females of any animal have the same general habits of life, but differ in structure, colour, or ornament, such differences have been mainly caused by sexual selection; that is, individual males have had, in successive generations, some slight advantage over other males, in their weapons, means of defence, or charms; and have transmitted these advantages to their male offspring.

As the handsome peacock struts his stuff to attract the peahens, so too does the handsome man to attract the woman. Ever notice that many women love athletes? The girl who gets the high school football quarterback is often the envy of her friends. There’s an evolutionary reason for why the girls want to date the quarterback—sexual selection. Since superior athletic performance suggests a more fit mate and thus greater reproductive success, women perceive a good athlete as more attractive. For example, a study published in the science journal Biology Letters⁷ found that cyclists who placed higher in the Tour de France were rated more attractive than cyclists who placed lower, and the preference for better cyclists was strongest in women not using a hormonal contraceptive. The study also found that even heterosexual men rated the better male cyclists as more attractive, although the association wasn’t as strong as when women were doing the rating. Other research has shown that both women and men perceive athletes on teams and in individual sports as being less lazy,