How To Boost Sexual Performance Naturally (The Last Article You Will Ever Need)

• A Nightmare In The Bedroom
• Can’t You Just Take The Blue Pill?
• Demystifying The Problem
• The Erection-Boosting Protocol
• It's All Up To You

A Nightmare In The Bedroom:

Your thoughts are racing.

“Not again...”, you think to yourself.

She’s resting her head on your chest, eyes closed, but you can’t escape this awful feeling.

She says she understands. She says it’s no big deal.

But you know deep down that you couldn’t give her what you both wanted.

Millions of men experience something just like this every day, and it’s one of the biggest issues preventing men from living a high quality life, filled with rich experiences and deep connection with their significant others.

In fact, over half of ALL men will experience erectile dysfunction (ED), with increasing frequency as they get older. This can range anywhere from being “off” for a few weeks at a time, to a full blown inability to “get it up”.

Statistics have shown that each decade of your life gives you a 10% increase in chance of experiencing and developing ED. That means when you’re 40, you’ll have a 40% chance… When you’re 50, you’ll have a 50% chance… And so on.

But here’s the truth: Regardless of whether you have trouble getting an erection, only have occasional problems, or have full blown ED, increasing the quality and frequency of your erections is something you should be interested in because of the power it has to improve your life.

And if you are experiencing problems, curing it naturally and from within needs to be a PRIORITY for you.

Luckily, after you’re finished with this course, you’ll know exactly what to do, how, and why, so you can not only banish erection problems for good, but experience even harder, fuller erections regularly, and enjoy the unbelievable sex life that comes along with it.

Read More: 5 Supplements To Reduce Cortisol Levels

Can’t You Just Take The Blue Pill?:

There are right ways and wrong ways to go about fixing this problem.

In the previous module, I mentioned that you need to improve erection quality naturally and from within.

But why do you need to do it naturally? Why from within?

Can’t you just take one of the pharmaceutical drugs?

In truth, if you use these drugs, you’re simply covering the problem with a band-aid.

These harmful ED drugs have strong effects on the body’s vascular system, and this can force your body to react in ways that are quite damaging.

The drastic changes in blood pressure most of these drugs cause is one of the most noticeable side effects of their use.

Users frequently complain of dramatic, rapidly occurring headaches and flushing of the skin upon ingestion of these pharmaceuticals, caused by the dilation of the blood vessels.

This same lowered blood pressure that can cause headaches is also enough to cause dizziness in some men, and there are even reports of men fainting in response to the ingestion of these compounds.

Full body aches and pains are very common, and users often have to take additional medication such as prescription painkillers to deal with these symptoms while using ED medication. 

Finally, many of these drugs report vision changes as one of their side effects.

Users have reported distorted vision, a loss of vision, or even the onset of what’s known as blue vision - a condition which causes the user to see shades of blue more intensely than other colors in the visible light spectrum.

If your head's not spinning with that long list of potential side effects, don’t worry there are more issue to come.

Needless to say, there are some serious problems with current synthetic ED treatment.

And not only can these “band-aids” cause all of these side effects, but they can actually make ED even worse over time.

You read that right. These drugs can make ED worse.

If you start popping these pills now, you may be able to get erections for a little while, but pretty soon you’ll notice that they slowly stop working (while you are left experiencing all the negative side effects that come with them and then some).

And as they continue to lose their effect, you’ll find that getting an erection naturally has become a true impossibility. You’ve skewed your system to come to rely on these drugs so much you really can’t achieve an erection without them - and their effects are fading (we’ll explain why this happens in a little bit).

If you felt it was tough to experience ED now, just imagine how much worse it will be when you’ve dug the hole deeper than you can get out of.

On the other hand, with the natural approach, you fix the underlying issue.

Not only are you able to get full, hard erections whenever you want, without having to make sure you’ve taken a pill, but you’ll be able to do so all on your own.

You’ll restore your natural ability without experiencing any of the negative side effects from pharmaceuticals. In fact it will be quite the opposite - you’ll experience great increases in your health as your body begins functioning at a higher level.

It’s known in medical fields that ED is one of the early warning signs of vascular disease. Instead of allowing your vascular system to continue to degrade, you’ll be working to improve it and reduce your disease risk, while continuing to get better and better erections.

It’s important to view ED as a symptom of a larger dysfunction in your body, and not just as an acute problem that exists all on its own. If you fix the problem, you’ll fix ED and get to experience much better erections overall. 

“Impotence is very often a sign of poor circulation. Moreover, those who rush to remedy the problem with a pharmaceutical solution could be ignoring an impending threat to their health.”

--- Dr. Geoff Hackett, sexual medicine consultant at Good Hope Hospital

Read More: The Ultimate Supplement Guide To Boosting Blood Flow Naturally

Demystifying The Problem:

Defining The Problem

Before we dive into the specifics of why erections can fail to happen, and the exact lifestyle, dietary, exercise and supplementation plans you’ll be using to improve your erections, we need to get more clarity on the problem we’re facing. 

For many men, erectile dysfunction issues begin when they experience a significant change in one of the following categories:

• Levels of fatigue
• Levels of stress
• Relationship issues
• Performance anxiety
• Alcohol consumption

When erectile dysfunction does happen, it can be considered primary, secondary, or situational.

Primary erectile dysfunction refers to erectile dysfunction that has been present throughout the entirety of someone’s life. There was no point when the problem “suddenly started”, it has just always been with them.

On the other hand, secondary erectile dysfunction refers to ED that is brought on by a big stress in one’s life, such as losing a job, getting a divorce, dealing with the death of a loved one, a major accident or surgery, etc.

The bigger the stress and the less adaptive your body is, the more likely this stress is to “knock you down a few pegs” into the stress state, which your body doesn’t bounce back from. Since your body has recalibrated into this higher stress state, erections become less likely, or stop altogether, and the only way to regain them is to pull your body back up into a more recovered, productive state. 

Finally, there’s a third type of erectile dysfunction, which isn’t true ED in the physiological sense, but is failure to get an erection due to psychological factors. This is called “situational ED”, or “psychogenic impotence”, and it’s the typical “performance anxiety” that can occur, like if a man can’t get an erection with a new partner due to nervousness. 

The breakdowns of the various types of ED are shown below:

Typically, situational ED (the psychological kind) is the most common, as it simply has to do with being nervous or under pressure, and isn’t the result of a physiological imbalance.

A good way to tell if you’re dealing with psychological ED is to see if you get erections at other times, especially during the night when erections naturally occur. For example, if you wake up with morning wood but can’t get it up with a partner, there’s a good chance that psychological factors are getting in the way.

There’s even a test called “The Stamp Test”, where you wrap a string of postage stamps around your penis before bed and seal the ring shut, then check in the morning to see if your night erections broke the ring. If the ring is broken, it means you had an erection during the night, and it's evidence that you’re physiologically able to get erections.

This type of ED is typically overcome best by getting in the right mindset to calm yourself down and take the pressure off, enjoying the moment for what it is. Confidence is a major player here. Many of the stress reducing techniques we’ll discuss later on will work to relax you in the moment, in addition to lowering stress-levels overall.

But when we talk about the physiological types of ED, secondary is by far the most common, as stress and/or aging (which is simply the accumulation of stress over one’s life) is far more common than any causes you would be born with.

However, many primary ED cases can still be treated using the same techniques to pull your body into a healthier, more productive state, since it’s usually brought about from simply being born in a higher stress state.*

*Note: When I refer to stress, I’m referring to anything that chronically raises the adaptive stress hormones (cortisol, adrenaline, estrogen, prolactin, etc.) and lowers the protective youth hormones (testosterone, DHT, DHEA, pregnenolone, progesterone, thyroid, etc.). There can be many things that cause stress hormones to rise, including inappropriate diets, toxins, nutritional imbalances, over-exercise, surgeries, big life stressors and psychological factors.

It may have already started to become apparent that, at the core, ED is a stress problem (again, using the broader definition of stress - anything that chronically raises the stress hormones and lowers the protective hormones).

But before we start fixing the problem, let’s take a quick look at what is actually happening, physiologically, so we can pinpoint the exact problem and define the solution even more clearly. 

Read More: How To Increase Vascularity And Muscle Definition Naturally

When Things Go Wrong…

The science behind how erections happen - and how they fail - is relatively simple, but often misunderstood.

Getting a clearer picture of what is actually going on will help us to realize exactly how to fix the problem, and why. And of course knowing why will help instill the importance of the action steps you’ll be taking to fix this problem once and for all.

Since we’ll be discussing how erections happen, this module will be a little graphic. Just relax and remember that it’s just biology!

How Erections Happen

To start, we know that erections happen when blood fills the penis, making it stiff.

Arteries carry blood to the penis, while veins carry blood away from it.

The physiologically unique thing about the penis is that when an erection happens, the arteries continue supplying blood while the veins close, trapping the blood to keep it hard.

From here, we can already analyze the 2 places where problems can arise: Blood getting in, or blood leaking out.

Blood coming in through the arteries is all about relaxing the smooth muscle in the penis (called the corpus cavernosum).

Think of this internal smooth muscle like a sponge, where the empty spaces inside the sponge are filled with blood.

When these muscles contract, they bulge and take up more space, allowing less room for blood to pool. When they relax, they open up more space, pulling in more blood through the arteries that supply it.

One of the major problems in ED is that these muscles are always contracted, and have a very hard time relaxing to allow blood to fill the spaces between them.

In fact, this is the exact same problem that happens in hypertension, where blood vessels constrict, increasing blood pressure. That’s why ED is such a good warning sign of vascular disease - the two problems are one in the same, and if it’s happening in the penis, there’s a good chance it’s happening systemically - everywhere else in the body - as well.

Right now, think about every muscle in your body and take a second to completely relax every single one.

When you did this, if you’re like most people, you probably realized you were contracting muscles that you weren’t even thinking about.

When you live in a stress state all the time, this same thing is happening in the smooth muscle in your body too, which in veins and arteries causes them to constrict and increase your blood pressure.

In the smooth muscle in your penis, it causes the smooth muscle to stay contracted and not allow blood to enter.

So what causes the smooth muscle to constrict or to relax? What’s the mechanism controlling this?

At the core, the contraction or relaxation of these muscles is stimulated by the interplay between carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO).

CO2 is a by-product of healthy energy production, and when your cells are producing a lot of it, it signals the rest of the body that energy is plentiful, times are good, and there isn’t much stress.

As such, CO2 naturally keeps your smooth muscle tissue relaxed and healthy, and acts as a vasodilator, increasing blood flow.(1)

When stress rises in the short-term, like during exercise, your body releases NO to relax smooth muscle even further to increase blood flow, especially to the specific places it’s needed (ie. the muscles you’re using in the workout). This NO release is paired with the high CO2 production to cause a strong vasodilating effect.

This is why you often see pre-workout powders talking about boosting NO - by increasing NO, you can increase the pump you get in the gym, since NO is relaxing the smooth muscle and increasing the blood flow for the pump.

It’s this same surge in NO that causes an erection to happen. The NO, paired with high CO2, is signaling the blood vessels to relax further than normal, causing blood to fill the penis.

However, if you’re under chronic stress, you begin to rely on the stress hormones to produce energy as the protective hormones decline.

On the cellular level, this means you stop producing energy in the healthy, productive way, and start producing energy with quicker, “dirtier” alternatives that don’t produce nearly as much CO2 (the scope of this discussion is beyond this program, but it involves the cellular energy processes of oxidative phosphorylation, glycolysis, and beta-oxidation.

With less CO2, your smooth muscles are less relaxed and your body will release more NO as a replacement to keep the blood vessel open to maintain the right blood pressure. In other words, your body begins using NO in place of the preferred CO2.

This becomes a real problem if it continues for too long, because NO binds to a crucial enzyme in the oxidative energy production pathway (called cytochrome c oxidase), blocking the production of CO2.(2)

This means as CO2 gets lower and lower, you need more and more NO to maintain your blood pressure. At a certain point, your body has a hard time producing enough NO, and your blood vessels start to become constricted (known as "vasoconstriction").

This is why an over reliance on the stress hormones eventually leads to diseases like hypertension and why these diseases, invariably, are always paired with high stress hormones, or high stress hormone action. The smooth muscle isn’t getting the CO2 it needs in order to relax, and can't produce enough NO to compensate. This causes the smooth muscles to stay more contracted and tighter, which leads to raised blood pressure.

More specifically for erections, it becomes much more difficult to relax and open up the corpus cavernosum enough to fill it with blood.

In other words, you need high levels of both CO2 and NO to get an erection, but chronically elevated NO will reduce CO2, by hampering oxidative energy production (which is where CO2 comes from).

Remember how we talked about the pharmaceutical drugs making ED even worse?

This is why.

These drugs artificially allow your body to produce massive amounts of NO, giving your body the temporary ability to get an erection.

However, at the same time, this extra NO is binding to the respiratory enzyme, reducing CO2 even further, and making the problem worse in the long run.

The real solution is to aid your body in it's natural production of NO, while taking steps to increase your production of CO2 through the oxidative metabolism.

The Blood Flow Out Problem

While “blood flow in” is the problem area in most cases, preventing blood from leaving is the other half of the equation and is also important.

It seems that the “blood flow in” problem tends to be more common in secondary ED (where some big stress or aging causes the problem), while the “blood flow out” problem is more common in primary ED (where the problem exists from day one).

When your arteries pull blood away from your penis too much, it can prevent the blood flowing in from getting trapped, preventing it from filling up to become stiff.

This is typically called “Venous Leakage”, because the veins that normally tighten to prevent blood from leaving are “leaking”, or allowing blood to leave.

Usually, this is caused by weak smooth muscles, or low structural integrity of the actual corpus cavernosum.

Similar to the blood flow in problem, these can both be caused from living in the stress state for too long, where the protective hormones like testosterone are low.

In fact, testosterone alone can fix both of these problems.

Therefore by reducing the causes of stress and restoring healthy cellular energy production, you can shift your hormones back towards the protective ones and strengthen both the tone of the smooth muscles in your veins and the integrity of the corpus cavernosum.

In addition, there are a few exercises you can use to strengthen the muscles in your pelvic floor, which have been shown to have a very positive effect on erection quality and other sexual characteristics (we’ll go into these in the module on exercise).

Before we get into those specifics though, we need to explain the “stress” situation just a little further.

Read More: The Lifestyle Guide To Boosting Blood Flow Naturally

It All Comes Down To Stress

Having looked at how erections happened - and how they can fail to happen - the true root cause is obvious: Low CO2 and not enough NO to compensate.

This situation is kicked off whenever CO2 is decreased for a long time, which happens when stress is elevated.

This includes all types of stress, from big emotional stresses (like the death of a loved one or the losing a job), to the stress on your body from a poor or deficient diet (especially from low carb diets, or diets high in PUFAs), to any physical stress (like over-exercising or under-eating for the fitness-oriented crowd), and even the accumulated stress of aging.

But it’s important to understand exactly how the adaptive stress system in your body works.

In general, we can characterize most hormones or molecules into “protective” or “adaptive”.

The protective hormones and molecules are ones like testosterone, DHT, pregnenolone, progesterone, DHEA, thyroid, and CO2, among many others.

The adaptive hormones and molecules are ones like adrenaline, cortisol, estrogen, prolactin, serotonin, aldosterone, and NO, among many others.

The key to understanding how these hormones interact in the body is to realize that all of the adaptive "stress" hormones are incredibly necessary for you to be alive and each have physiologically important roles for development and resistance to stress.

However, these adaptive hormones also all have very negative effects, acting to halt the more “expendable” functions of the body, like hair growth, skin quality, higher-level thinking, and of course, sexual function and reproduction.

In a completely healthy person, these hormones are always paired with the protective hormones, which prevent the negative effects from happening, while allowing their physiologically relevant actions to take place.

For example, estrogen is important for female development, but it needs to be paired with adequate levels of progesterone to prevent the negative effects of the hormone (excessive weight gain, sluggishness, reduced metabolism, etc.).

Think of the levels of your protective hormones as your location on the spectrum of healthy to sick.

When testosterone, DHT, pregnenolone, DHEA, progesterone, and thyroid are all high, it’s a signal to your body that times are good, and that it can put much more energy into those “expendable” functions.

Your body is in a “productive” mode - getting things done - versus a “conservative” mode - reserving energy just to survive. It’s abundance versus scarcity.

Whenever there’s a short-term stress, like exercise or sex, your body will raise its energy output by increasing the stress hormones. Under the context of high protective hormones, this mobilizes a lot of energy to help you meet the stress.

But whenever these adaptive hormones are released, they knock your protective hormones down a bit, moving you into the sickness state a little more.

With short-term adaptive stresses, this isn’t a problem - your protective hormones raise back up or even higher, as your body recovers from the stress (that's why exercise raises testosterone and makes you more resistant to stress). These protective hormones help to tell your body that it has the energy needed to bolster itself up to fight the stress better next time.

But with repeated exposure to these adaptive hormones without adequate recovery (long-term aging), or in a situation where the adaptive hormones remain elevated (a big, longer-lasting stress), the negative effect on the protective hormones begins to add up, dropping them further and further, and moving you more and more into the stressed, sickness state.

Once the protective hormones get too low, your body relies on the adaptive hormones to create energy, and your body recalibrates to this lower level.

When it comes to male health and getting an erection, CO2 and NO work in this way.

CO2 is the protective substance, and it signals your body that energy is plentiful and that “expendable” functions - like getting an erection - can run at full force.

When you’re faced with the stress of having sex, your body will release NO to help meet this stress. In the context of high CO2, this is a great thing, and will lead to strong erections.

But if CO2 is low from too much stress or too long-lasting stress, then NO is raise much higher to compensate, which further lowers CO2, reducing your ability to get an erection.

This is the framework we’ll be using in the upcoming modules to look at precisely what steps to take with your diet, exercise and supplementation protocols in order to improve your erections.

With all that out of the way, let’s dive into one of the most powerful tools we have for improving erections: Your diet.

The Erection-Boosting Protocol:

The Diet Plan

Diet is easily one of the most powerful tools we have for improving erections.

That’s because diet influences internal health more than anything else. It’s the closest interaction between our internal physiology and the environment.

And in the context of keeping the stress hormones low and the protective hormones high, specifically increasing CO2 and reducing the reliance on NO, there are a few main things we want to focus on with your diet.

Specifically, we want to eat plenty of carbs, eat plenty of sodium, avoid PUFAs, eat more anti-inflammatory amino acids, and correct any micronutrient deficiencies.

If you want to have a step by step protocol on exactly what and how to eat in a way that fights stress, boost natural blood flow, and is designed to help the body heal, Make sure to check out The Thermo Diet. 

#1: Eat Plenty Of Carbs

Carbs are incredibly important to your body, especially the functioning of your organs, like your liver and brain.

And while carbs aren’t necessarily essential (meaning you can live without them), you can’t thrive without them.

Carbs are basically the “high octane” fuel in your body, while fat is more of a “slow burn” energy source, and protein is mostly reserved for building and adapting tissues and enzymes, or being converted to carbs or fat to be burned as fuel.

If you only burn fat, you certainly wouldn’t die, but you’ll only be producing around 60% of the CO2 that you could produce if you were burning pure carbs (this has to do with the cellular production of energy from each of these fuel sources).

This make sense evolutionarily as well - if you weren’t consuming any carbs, your body would understand that times were tough and there wasn’t much energy around, so it would switch more into conservation mode.

Along this line, it’s also been shown that carbohydrate consumption boosts testosterone, which is very clearly important for sexual health and the ability to get an erection (which ultimately, is pointing towards the fact that low carb diets are a stress, moving you out of the healthy state, towards the sickness state).

But the interplay of carbs in your diet also helps to show an important point about how the adaptive hormones work in your body.

Consider that many people, when initially switching to a low carb diet, might experience much more frequent and intense erections.

Can you guess why?

When switching to a low carb diet, CO2 production begins to drop, while NO production rises to compensate. Since the negative cellular adaptation to NO hasn’t happened yet, the increased levels of NO stimulate erections to happen much more strongly.

However, this effect soon goes away once the oxidative metabolism starts getting blocked, and NO is all on it’s own without the protective CO2 and protective hormones to allow it to have its positive effects.

This is called the “Catecholamine Honeymoon”, since it feels good to have these stress hormones raised initially, until the long-term effects kick in and the degradation to your long-term state of health begins to decline.

So carbs are important for maintaining a high state of health - but does the type of carb matter?

In truth, the types of carbs you eat are less important, although it’s worth mentioning that there are a lot of benefits to consuming more sugar, despite the way sugar is typically depicted in mainstream nutrition.

Specifically, sugar contains a molecule called fructose that refills liver glycogen better than any other type of carb (which is crucially important for healthy energy production), and has many positive benefits attributed to it when it’s not being impeded by other harmful foods (specifically, most negative research around fructose has it paired with a high PUFA diet, which has many negative effects on the body - these effects aren’t apparent when PUFAs aren’t present).

Fructose also causes no insulin response, aiding in weight loss and blood sugar regulation. It’s protective for liver cells and is capable of producing more CO2 than glucose.

Generally I recommend focusing on fruits, fruit juices, honey, and other natural sources of sugar, with the occasional starch thrown in (think rice, potatoes, sourdough etc.).

#2: Eat Sodium To Taste

There seems to be a prevailing belief that sodium is bad for you and that it raises blood pressure and water retention.

In reality, sodium is very good for you, and when you’re stressed, your body craves more of it to help it handle the stress.

You even have a stress hormone dedicated to retaining it in your body - called aldosterone - which is raised in all stressful situations to help your body hold onto this precious mineral.

The belief about its effects on blood pressure and water retention come from some poorly interpreted research, along with the a narrowed focus on the short-term.

Within the following few days of increasing sodium, blood pressure and water retention may rise slightly, which has led many to think this is a long-term effect of sodium.

In truth, think about what is happening internally when you start eating more of it.

Remember that I said aldosterone is a stress hormone that helps your body retain sodium?

Well in the few days after eating more sodium, aldosterone is still high, causing your body to hold onto to large amounts of sodium, leading to an increase in blood pressure and water retention.

But within a few days, aldosterone drops when your body realizes times are good and sodium is plentiful, and your blood pressure and water retention even back out - only now with lower baseline aldosterone levels.

This is important, because if aldosterone remains elevated for long periods of time, it will have long-term negative effects on your health, specifically leading to the exact things we blame sodium on - hypertension and water retention.

It’s much better to eat sodium based on taste (this is what your body is telling you it needs) and keep aldosterone low, so that you don’t develop long-term hypertension and water retention.

But when it comes to improving erections, sodium is extremely important, since it has such important impact on the vascular system.

Remember when we talked about how erections happen, and how the smooth muscles needed to relax to allow increased blood flow? Remember how hypertension is the result of tight, contract smooth muscle in your blood vessels?

This is the exact same “blood pressure” we’re talking about when it comes to sodium.

If your aldosterone levels are high and stay high for a long time, it leads to the smooth muscle in your blood vessels - and penis - to become more tight and contracted, which leads to higher blood pressure and erection problems.

If you eat more sodium, your blood pressure might rise initially while your aldosterone levels drop back down, but they will settle down to normal within a few days. Then, since your aldosterone is now lower, your smooth muscles will be able to start healing and relaxing over time, leading to lower blood pressure and better erections.

This is all supported by that fact that there are many studies correlating sodium intake to life-span, showing that higher sodium diets are always associated with living longer.

#3: Avoid PUFAs

While eating carbs is important for increasing CO2, you also want to minimize anything that will have a negative effect on healthy energy production.

Specifically, one of the biggest offenders is free radical damage from polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), which is causative in many hormonal problems and vascular deterioration.

The reason is that the double bonds in PUFAs are very unstable, especially when combined with heat, light, or oxygen - two of which are very abundant in your body.

That means even if the heat, light, and oxygen that vegetable oils are exposed to before you eat them aren’t enough to break the weak double bonds and create free radicals and harmful by-products, then the high heat and oxygen in your body will definitely get the job done.

These free radicals damage cells and tissues, and prevents them from creating energy through the healthy metabolism - the one that creates CO2 and helps keep your body in the abundant state. Think of PUFA as a magnet pulling you down into the sickness state.

This includes the so-called “healthy” fish oils, which are the most unstable and immunosuppressive of all the PUFAs. Many of their claimed benefits come from suppressing the immune system, in the same way that x-rays were once claimed to have health benefits before the danger of being exposed to them was revealed.

Considering the research showing how harmful their breakdown products, like acrolein and HNE, are (causing all sorts of ailments, including Alzheimer’s Disease), and how easily they degrade, it’s best to avoid these oils at all costs.

There’s been a lot of misconception about PUFAs, mostly fueled by marketing, but in truth they have no place in warm-blooded animals like ourselves. This is supported by the fact that SFAs and MUFAs increase testosterone (showing that the body is being pulled toward the health state), while PUFAs decrease it (showing that the body is being pulled toward the sickness state).

Saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids (SFAs and MUFAs) are much more stable at higher temperatures, and should be the primary types of fats you eat.

This means you should focus your fats around coconut oil, butter, dairy fat, fat from low PUFA animals like beef (poultry and pork contain a much higher amount of PUFA), olive oil, avocados, and macadamia nut oil.

On the other side, this means avoiding vegetable oils, avoiding nuts and nut oils, avoiding seeds and seed oils, and staying clear of fish oil.

Because the fat in your body has a slow turnover rate, avoiding PUFAs will have more of a long-term benefit to your health, rather than being a quick fix. It can take anywhere from 1-4 years to completely shift your internal fat composition to mostly SFAs and MUFAs.

Having said that, coconut oil and other highly saturated fats do a great job “diluting” the PUFAs in your body, allowing you to move into the health state much more quickly, and allowing your body to detox them slowly over time (through your liver, using a process called "glucuronidation").

#4: Eat More Anti-Inflammatory Amino Acids

In general, eating a medium range of protein is highly beneficial to your health.

Going up to 1+ grams per pound of bodyweight can be excessive (but appropriate in certain situations), and only getting 0.25 grams per pound of bodyweight can be too little and lead to deficiencies.

The sweet spot for most people is 0.5-0.75 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight.

This amount supports your muscles and organs, and provides plenty of amino acids for all the purposes your body could need.

However, the composition of those amino acids can lead to a higher or lower state of stress, depending on what you eat.

Some of the amino acids (specifically tryptophan, cysteine, methionine, and histidine) are involved in kicking off the stress response and inflammation in the body. This isn’t a bad thing necessarily, as your body needs to be able to turn on stress when it’s appropriate, but in an already stressed system, these can lead your body to overdoing the stress response.

However, these amino acids have been found to lower thyroid activity in the body, and thyroid hormone is the most important hormone for keeping CO2 levels high, as it signals the cells to produce energy with the oxidative metabolism.

Luckily, there are also anti-inflammatory amino acids (specifically glycine, proline, alanine, and hydroxyproline), which can help calm your body, put you into a peaceful and relaxed state, and improve your body’s ability to recover. These help balance out the inflammatory amino acids.

So where are the inflammatory (stressful) and anti-inflammatory (anti-stressful) amino acids found?

Typically, the stressful amino acids are found in higher proportion in the muscles of animals - what we consider “meat”. Think breast meat, leg meat, thigh meat, all cuts of beef, etc.

However, when we look at the whole animal - organs, tendons, collagen, skin, etc. - we see that there is a much higher proportion of the anti-stress amino acids.

Previous cultures used to eat the whole animal, and much of their good health was probably due to the fact that their amino acids were balanced (along with all the micronutrients, enzymes and good hormones found in organ meats).

In our culture, we’ve gotten away from this and only eat the muscles of animals, which creates an internal physiological situation similar to when your body breaks your own muscles down for amino acids - this signals a stressful state, and stimulates your body to slow down.

But remember what I said - the stress amino acids aren’t bad, they just need to be balanced.

That’s why I recommend adding powdered gelatin to any muscle meats you eat (Great Lakes brand is my favorite). I do this any time I eat steak, chicken, burgers… You name it. Add a little gelatin (either while cooking or after) and the amino acids in the meal become far more balanced.

The best part of this is that the gelatin makes the meat taste WAY better - I actually find that I want to include it because it tastes so good (I’ve found it’s absolutely fire when added to a Chipotle bowl).

Another good source of the anti-stress amino acids is bone broth, which I use to cook any starches I eat (rice, potatoes, white rice pasta, etc..), or simply drink, hot, with meals or on it’s own (usually before bed).

As far as other protein sources, dairy has a very balanced blend of amino acids and is typically a really good source of protein with a high biological value (meaning your body uses it really well). This goes for eggs, too.

Protein from non-animal sources can be alright, but typically these sources contain too much PUFA, and not enough protein to really get much benefit from it.

#5: Correct Micronutrient Deficiencies

Finally, it’s important that you correct any micronutrient deficiencies you may have.

Micronutrients - the vitamins and minerals you eat in food or supplements - are important for tons of different biological processes, and being deficient in any of them can cause problems.

That’s why I recommend eating mostly “whole” foods that contain lots of nutrients - foods like whole animals, fruits, some veggies, and dairy. Some starches here and there can be good as well, especially if you’re working out to build muscle mass.

Unfortunately it’s hard to know exactly which micronutrient deficiencies you might have, unless you do micronutrient testing.

That’s why it’s best to consume whole foods 80% of the time, to ensure you’re getting everything you need.

Read More: The Hidden History Of Why Vegetable Oil Is In Your Kitchen Will Shock You

The Exercise Program

Exercise is another powerful tool we can use, since it allows us to control our internal physiology in specific ways.

Any sort of physical activity causes a larger amount of energy to be burned, and this alone will increase body temperature and CO2 production, helping us in our quest to increase levels of CO2 in our bodies.

It also helps improve the function of our cardiovascular systems (which is inherently important for getting an erection), and can boost our bodies’ natural antioxidant and detox systems, preventing damage from free radicals, and allowing us to better expel harmful substances and excess adaptive hormones (like estrogen).

And of course, exercise increases the strength of a muscle over time, and by exercising specific muscles involved in the erection process, we can not only improve erections, but also the entire sexual experience.

When it comes to exercise for improving ED, there are two main categories we’ll be focusing on: General exercises and specific erection exercises.

General Exercise Plan

General exercise is important because it can help make you more resistant to stress, and help your body adapt even further into the health side of the spectrum.

The key is remembering that exercise is also a stress, and if you don’t allow your body to recover completely, you can actually do damage instead of helping your situation.

This means you want to keep the stress of workouts tough, but brief. Send the signal to adapt, and then back off and let your body recover.

For this reason, I like to limit any high intensity workouts to 3-4 times per week, sometimes even less if your body is under some sort of stress, or if your workouts start feeling overly draining.

Lower intensity stuff like long walks or recreational activity can be done more often, but I still recommend at least taking one day off per week.

Specifically, I recommend something like the THOR exercise program (which you have access to in your dashboard), which utilizes the right high intensity, high power movements to elicit the right adaptations, and even promotes higher testosterones levels and a better hormonal profile.

If you don’t currently exercise at all, I recommend starting here, doing just 3 resistance training workouts per week, with a little walking thrown in on other days.

If you’re an avid exerciser, then you already know a bit more about what you can handle and what might be too much stress, but I highly recommend taking a closer look at what you’re doing and be sure that you’re not overdoing it.

I’ve seen far too many people neurotically push themselves way too hard and too often in the gym, only to burn out and develop some serious hormonal problems that need harder treatment to overcome (many of these people end up accepting a lower state of health for the rest of their lives, never realizing how much better things could be).

If you are interested in a program based on science and taught by professionals make sure to check out the programs on UMZUfit!

Specific Exercises For Erections

In addition to improving your overall system to allow better erections, you can also train specific muscles that will help improve your ability to get and stay hard during sex.

The muscle we need to strengthen is one called the pubococcygeus, or pelvic floor, muscle, and it’s closely involved in increasing the “blood flow in” part of an erection through the arteries, and helps trap blood in the penis, solving the “blood flow out” part as well.

In fact, a study was done that showed a better improvement in erections from exercising this muscle than from doing a generic exercise program combined with a better diet and healthy habits. Pairing the two together would be like throwing gasoline on the fire.

We can train this muscle through an exercise called “Kegels”, which is basically just a contraction of this muscle, held for a certain amount of time, and repeated a certain number of times.

First, it’s important to recognize what it feels like to contract this muscle, so that you can get clearer on exactly how to exercise it.

Specifically, this is the muscle that contracts whenever you ejaculate, and it’s the same muscle that causes you to stop peeing midstream or clear the urethra of urine.

So one of the best ways to recognize what this muscle feels like is to try stopping the flow of urine midstream.

I don’t recommend doing this all the time, but as an initial way to make a neural connection, this is a great way to do it.

Once you know what it feels like to contract the muscle, you can exercise it 1-3 times per day in a couple of different ways.

One way is to “go for reps” by squeezing the muscle repeatedly for as many times as possible. This is better for increasing the strength of ejaculation, but will also have benefits for getting an erection.

Another way is to do “timed reps”, where you hold for 5-10 seconds, rest for 5-10 seconds, and then hold again, aiming to do more 5-10 second reps over time.

The best way to train specifically for erections, however, is to “go for time” and see how long you can hold the contraction, working up to 40 seconds or more.

My favorite way to work on this is to time your set, holding for as long as you can. Then when you release, rest for half the time you worked on the previous set, before going again.

Repeat this until you get below a 5-10 second contraction, and then end the “workout”.

Make sure you’re fully contracting, hard, on each set, and if you can’t hold it for more than 10 seconds, than simply work on building that up first.

Now, as effective as these exercises are for erection quality and sexual performance (they can cure premature ejaculation too), the bigger challenge is staying consistent and remembering to do them.

You absolutely MUST incorporate these exercises into some sort of routine if you want to see results.

I recommend sticking to 2 sessions per day, one in the morning and one at night (ideally as a part of your morning and night routines - if you don’t have morning and night routines, I highly recommend creating ones).

Each session shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes. Start with the longer holds (aka “going for time”), then move to the medium holds (aka “timed reps”), and finish with short holds (aka “going for reps”).

After a few weeks, when you can hold for a full minute or longer, this muscle will be much stronger and will be able to support an erection for much longer, extend your ability to “stay” (ie. not ejaculate), and improve your ejaculations.

Once your diet and exercise are set up for preventing ED, we can add the next layer - supplementation - to increase the strength of your erections while continue to improve your overall health.

The Supplementation Protocol

Once your diet and training routines are set in stone, the final piece that can have dramatic effects on your erection quality is supplementation.

While searching for natural substances that could be used to enhance vascular health and reduce or eliminate erectile dysfunction, four compounds emerged as clear standouts.

Those four compounds are Pine Bark Extract, Horse Chestnut Extract, Vitamin C, and Garlic Extract, all of which we knew we had to include in our best-selling Redwood supplement. 

These four compounds had the largest amount of peer-reviewed research outlining their effects on the vascular system.

As you know, your ability to get an erection is predicated on your ability to achieve better vascular health and fitness. These compounds have been shown to enhance overall vascular health and have the potential to improve ED and related symptoms drastically.

Pine Bark Extract

Pine Bark Extract (Pycnogenol) has been shown to enhance NO production and reduce the instances of venous leakage.

This is incredibly important for fixing the “blood flow out” problem that can cause a failure to get an erection, that we talked about in Module 4. 

Any compound that demonstrated a proven ability to reduce instances of venous leakage was something we knew would be important for helping to fix this problem and improve erections, and Pine Bark Extract works for this perfectly.

On top of that, certain components of pine bark extract have been found to protect against oxidative stress by increasing the antioxidant enzymes in cells, while also protecting vitamin C and vitamin E, which are both important for reducing inflammation and increasing blood flow.

Horse Chestnut Extract

A less common addition to the list of highly researched natural ED supplements is Horse Chestnut Extract (Aesculus hippocastanum).

This extract has been shown to reduce symptoms of poor blood circulation, such as varicose veins, pain, tiredness, swelling in the legs, and water retention. 

Most importantly Horse Chestnut Extract contains Aescin, a powerful compound which regulates vascular tone and helps to reduce inflammation. Aescin in a powerful mediator of endothelial NO synthase, which increases levels of nitric oxide in the blood vessels when it is needed.

Horse Chestnut Extract also reduces venous leakage and the occurrence of “spider veins” similar to Pine Bark Extract.

Vitamin C

We already discussed how correcting micronutrient deficiencies were important for improving your health in order to support a better sex life, but by specifically supplementing with higher amounts of certain micronutrients, you can achieve even better results.

One micronutrient that supports our goal of improving erections when taken in higher doses is vitamin C.

Vitamin C has been shown in numerous studies to be one of the strongest and most reliable NO potentiates, meaning that it makes you more sensitive to the effects of NO - which is exactly what we need to do.

While most guys could get enough vitamin C if they ate enough fruits and vegetables, it is rare to meet someone who actually gets enough.

What’s more, getting higher doses than you would get from food alone can help improve the situation even more, which is where supplementation can be very beneficial.

Garlic

The last compound whose track record of efficacy vastly outstrips all other competitors is garlic.

It may be hard to believe that such a common food can have such powerful effects on vascular health and symptoms of ED.

Suspend your doubt. Garlic, in the right dose, has been shown to have some seemingly miraculous effects on the body.

The issue is that most people don’t get anywhere near enough of the beneficial compounds (quercetin and nitrates) to see the true benefits of garlic. This is why a particular type of garlic (4:1 garlic extract) is needed in order to experience garlic’s substantial benefits.

Garlic has been shown to reduce blood pressure as much as many prescription medications. In some cases it even beats out conventional blood pressure lowering medications.

These effects are caused by the high concentration of quercetin and nitrates in garlic. These two compounds have been shown to help restore your body’s ability to release large amounts of NO into the blood when it is needed (like when you want to get an erection).

While I definitely recommend eating a bunch of garlic, for many people, doing this on a regular basis is just not realistic.

Beyond the seriously negative effects on your body odor, the amount of garlic you would have to eat to mimic the effects of 4:1 extract is ridiculously large.

Most people are just not going to eat that much in one day, and it’s much easier and more reliable to supplement with it.

Redwood: The Best Supplement For Boosting Blood Flow And Erection Quality

These four compounds stood out so much in the research, that we wanted to create a supplement that included all of them.

The end result was one of the most powerful supplements for increasing blood flow, improving erection quality, and fixing ED, which we call “Redwood”.

Not only are all the ingredients in Redwood proven, clinically, to help with erections and blood flow, it's also proven to work in the real world through the hoards of testimonials we get every single day.

Because Redwood is so highly effective, we recommend adding it to your ED-busting protocol to really create some effective improvements.

It's All Up To You

You’re now equipped with the knowledge to massively improve your erections and sex life.

However, the key to getting results is to actually implement all of it.

I recommend starting small, with one thing at a time, and getting really good at it.

For example, you might start with your diet, eating more carbs, salting your food, adding gelatin/bone broth to your meats, and avoiding PUFAs.

Then once you’re comfortable doing that, you can add in the next step, whether it be one of the things we talked about in the Training module, or adding the Redwood supplement to really kick things off (this is a very easy “first step” as well, since all you have to do is remember to take it each day).

Build up slowly and make all of this stuff a habit, so that it’s a part of your daily system.

If you implement all of this stuff, you’ll get to experience the massive benefits that come with improved blood flow and better erections.