7 Things That Make Erections Harder (Without Pills)

There are seven pillars to rock hard erections, and if you want to overcome performance anxiety or erectile dysfunction, then you want to make sure you have these pillars strong, and then your erection is going to be strong as well.

Hey, I’m Phoenix Blake, sex coach and educator, and I’ve personally suffered with erectile dysfunction, so I know how difficult it can be.

I’ve gone on a long journey over a number of years to work out what exactly you can do to get better erections without pharmaceuticals, and I believe these seven pillars are the most important things that you can do. They break down into three categories, being physical, mental and relational.

On the physical side of things, we need to optimise our body for strong erections.

1. Cardiovascular Health

The first pillar, and arguably the most important pillar, is cardiovascular health. Having good cardiovascular health is your body’s ability to pump blood around the body, and the health of your arteries and your veins.

When you get an erection, you get 20 to 40 times more blood flowing into your penis compared to when it’s flaccid, and even just a small drop in that blood flow can lead to a semi-erect penis or a not fully erect penis.

Anything you can do to improve your cardiovascular health is also going to help improve your erections as well. There was a study done on heart attack patients that showed simply by walking, they were able to reduce erectile dysfunction in these patients.

What you should do to improve your cardiovascular health depends on your level of fitness. It could be as simple as walking, or if you’re a fitter person like me, then you might want to up the stakes by doing things like running or weightlifting or high-intensity interval training.

You also want to work on your diet and have a diet that will maximise your overall health and cardiovascular health, and you want to eat foods that will help you produce nitric oxide, which is the chemical that our body releases to dilate our blood vessels and allow blood to flow into your penis.

You can go ahead and check out this article on the best foods for nitric oxide production if that’s something that you want to improve.

And honestly, I cannot stress cardiovascular health enough as the main pillar of strong, hard erections.

2. Pelvic Floor Exercises

Our pelvic floor muscles play a vital role in pushing blood into our penis, but also trapping blood in our penis and keeping it there so we can have firm, hard erections.

Most guys have weak pelvic floor muscles that are seriously dampening their erections, and simply by doing Kegel and reverse Kegel exercises, you can really strengthen those pelvic floor muscles and see a boost in your erections.

In fact, it’s one of the things that I notice the most. When I forget to do it or I stop doing it, I notice the difference in my erections, and then when I start doing pelvic floor exercises regularly again, within about two weeks to a month I notice my erections are way stronger than they used to be.

I’ve got a full article on how to do pelvic floor exercises, but my favourite way to do them, that I found to be most effective, I learned from the porn star Erik Everhard in his book.

And that is to masturbate and get yourself completely hard, get a lot of blood flow in the area so we can really activate those muscles, and then stop masturbating.

Get two fingers and put them on your perineum, between your balls and your bum, and then clench your pelvic floor as hard as you possibly can. You’ll feel your perineum push out onto your fingers, so you can really feel when it’s activated or when it starts to relax, so you can pay attention and keep it activated.

The goal here is to hold it tight, as hard as you can, for 10 seconds, then just release for one to two seconds, then hold it tight again for 10 seconds and release. Repeat this about five or six times, or until you lose your erection, and then regain your erection and do it again. Do about three to five sets of this, and do it multiple times per week.

What you’ll notice in the beginning is that you can’t even hold your pelvic floor muscles for 10 seconds for the first rep, let alone the second one or the third one, up to the fifth or sixth one, and you definitely can’t do it for three sets in a row.

It’s very difficult because your muscles are going to be weak, but over time the muscles will get stronger, you can hold the sets for longer, and also you’ll notice that your erection stays around for longer.

When you start doing this exercise, you’ll lose your erection pretty quickly, but then as you do this more and more over weeks and months, you notice your erection stays around for longer and you can keep it there for longer.

The hardest thing with pelvic floor is just remembering to do them, so do whatever you can to make it a habit and a regular part of your life, or a regular part of your masturbation.

3. Testosterone And Hormones

It’s really important to have your testosterone levels good if you want to maximise your sex drive and if you want to maximise your erections.

Now, testosterone tends to be over-amplified in how important it is for erections, and many guys look to testosterone as the only reason for erectile dysfunction. However, I’ve heard that low testosterone only accounts for roughly 5% of erectile dysfunction, with 95% of erectile dysfunction having other causes.

However, it is something you should definitely get checked by having a blood test with your doctor, and there are also things that you can do to boost your testosterone naturally. You can eat Brazil nuts, you can take certain supplements, you can lift weights.

In fact, I talk about a variety of supplements that you can take and exercises that you can do to not only boost your testosterone but improve your erections in my free ED toolkit. You can get access to this toolkit by going to passionately.com/ed.

In that toolkit you’ll learn exact steps you can take to get stronger and harder erections, and it’s available completely for free.

Now, moving on from the physical to the mental side of things.

4. Presence

It’s your ability to be present in the moment.

A lot of performance anxiety, or erectile dysfunction caused by us being anxious or worried about not getting an erection, is caused when we actually future project.

If you’re worrying about the future, if you’re thinking in your head, “I really hope I get it up,” or “I don’t know if I’m going to get it up,” you’re actually projecting into the future and worrying about that. You’re not simply being present with your partner.

You’ll notice that some of the best sex of your life that you’ve had, or times when you’ve had the hardest erections ever, you weren’t actually thinking about your erection or trying to get an erection.

You were likely just extremely present with the partner that you were with, you were very aroused and turned on by them, and you were just enjoying them, and the erection just tended to happen.

So our ability to get out of our heads and into the moment is extremely important to overcome performance anxiety and to get the best erections possible.

This is because erections occur when our parasympathetic nervous system is activated. This is our rest-and-digest, or our calming, nervous system. It’s not our sympathetic nervous system, or the fight-or-flight nervous system.

Often we think of erections as getting excited, but it’s better to think of it as calm arousal. We want to be calm and let our erections come naturally, rather than being highly excited or nervous or anxious and trying to make it happen.

The ability to be present and calm our mind allows us to activate this calming part of our nervous system and allows the erection to come on stronger.

5. Conditioning

It’s the way that we condition our mind and our body for arousal, for erections and for sex.

Many of us make the mistake of poorly conditioning ourselves through our porn and our masturbation habits, so that when we’re actually with a real-life partner, we find it difficult to get it up and keep it up.

This is partly due to the fact that porn is a super stimulus, and it is so visually stimulating that it creates pathways in our mind that rely on that intense visual stimulation in order for us to get aroused and to get an erection. Then when we’re with a partner, it’s much more sensual, it’s much less visual, and it’s harder for us to get an erection.

Also, we tend to condition ourselves with a very firm grip and a very fast stroke in order for us to get an erection, maintain an erection and get to orgasm.

And to top it all off, while we’re doing this, while we’re watching our porn and we’re masturbating really hard and fast, we’re actually not extremely aware of our body and the physical sensations in our body.

Yeah, it feels good, but you’re not actually paying attention to the way your hand feels on your penis. Chances are you’re more focused on what is arousing you on the screen.

And what this means is we’re conditioning ourselves to not really be aware of our body, and to not activate the physical stimulation pathway to help us get erect.

What this does is it makes us heavily reliant on mental arousal in order to get an erection, and it dampens or weakens the physical sensation pathway to get an erection.

Because you can actually get an erection without being mentally aroused at all, and this can be one of the best ways to get an erection when you’re with a partner and when you’re nervous.

But many of us don’t work on activating this physical sensation pathway and being aware of the physical sensations in our body, and this means we’re more likely to have erectile dysfunction when we’re with a partner.

I’ve done a full video on exactly how to masturbate to boost your erections and overcome erectile dysfunction, so check that out if you’re interested.

And the last two pillars of rock hard erections are relational pillars.

6. Communication With Our Partner

If it’s with a short-term partner, this can be our confidence in our ability to communicate our erectile dysfunction if and when it happens.

Often we’re so worried about losing our erection with a new partner because we don’t know how to explain to them what’s happening, or how to drive that interaction so it ends up being positive for both of you.

Most guys, if it happens to them, they don’t really say anything at all, and it just becomes an incredibly awkward experience for you and the woman, where she feels like, “Oh, he’s just not really that into me,” and you’re really frustrated that you can’t get it up.

But if you can confidently communicate with your partners and say, “Yeah, look, sometimes this happens, it’s not actually a big deal. I’m just a little bit nervous because I really want to please you. How about we do something else instead? Maybe we cuddle, maybe I go down on you, maybe I give you pleasure, or we have a massage.”

Basically, you take this sexual situation in a direction where you don’t need to get erect in the next 10 to 20 minutes. Then you can calm yourself down, allow your erection to come back naturally, and often you’ll have really great sex anyway.

If you know how to communicate with your partner like this, you’re going to be way less stressed about the whole situation, and so erectile dysfunction is actually less likely to happen.

But even if it does happen, you know how to direct the sexual encounter so that you can still have a great time and can give yourself time to get an erection.

Also in communication is being able to communicate with longer-term partners, to explain to them that, “Hey, I do have this issue,” or “I’m struggling a bit more lately,” to not be ashamed of it, but work out ways together that the two of you can increase your chance of getting an erection, or still have great sexual experiences even if you’re unable to get an erection.

7. Pleasure Without Penetration

Being able to give and receive pleasure without the need for penis-vagina penetration is extremely important when it comes to having a great, interesting and diverse sex life.

By taking the pressure off the need for an erection to happen in order for anything sexual to happen, you’re less likely to be anxious, which means you’re more likely to get an erection at some point during the encounter.

But what’s more important is that even if you don’t get an erection, you can still connect with each other sexually and still give each other amazing pleasure, and it can be an incredibly connecting experience for you.

This can be things like soft penis play, and communicating with your partner that it still feels really great when they touch your penis even when it’s soft, exploring different parts of your body and different things that you like, even if you’re not getting an erection.

And it also means being able to pleasure your partner without your penis. In fact, the majority of orgasms that I’ll give my partners is going to be with my fingers and with my mouth, not with my penis.

So learning how to give pleasure to your partner in this way means that you can give them orgasm after orgasm after orgasm without ever getting hard, so you can still have some of the best sex of your life without actually having penetration.

And if you want to learn how to give your partners some of the best orgasms using your fingers and your mouth, then check out my free oral orgasm tutorial, where I show you exactly how to do that.

Or alternatively, check out my full ED course to learn the things that I did to allow me to stop needing Viagra anymore.