Cut From Steel

He spent ninety minutes sealed in a coffin at the bottom of a pool

Harry Houdini introduced the Chinese Water Torture Cell in Berlin on 21 September 1912. He was locked upside down in a glass and steel cabinet filled to overflowing with water, holding his breath for more than three minutes while an audience watched him through the glass.

The part people forget is that the lock was never the trick. Locks get solved in a workshop, months earlier, in private. What Houdini actually sold was the ability to stay calm and conscious inside a situation that kills ordinary men in ninety seconds.

In August 1926, at 52, he had himself sealed in a casket and submerged in the swimming pool of a New York hotel. He stayed under for an hour and a half. That September he did it again at a YMCA in Worcester, Massachusetts, for an hour and eleven minutes.

None of that arrived from the stage. It came out of years of unglamorous conditioning that no audience ever bought a ticket to watch.

Houdini died on 31 October 1926, at 52, of peritonitis, having carried on performing with a temperature of 104 degrees because he did not want to disappoint a house.

The work that made Houdini possible was the part nobody could see him doing. Today's letter is about a muscle in precisely that category.

You have a muscle down there and nobody mentioned it

You have been offered a tablet, and for a great many men the tablet works. Nobody has mentioned that there is a muscle involved in this, or that it responds to training in the way every other muscle does.

I want to give you a trial rather than a theory. A randomised controlled trial published in the British Journal of General Practice put 55 men with erectile dysfunction through pelvic floor muscle exercises with biofeedback.

Their median age was 59, with a range from 22 to 78. That is your demographic almost exactly.

It's not age. It's these three.

I will give you three things from that trial, and one exercise you can do sitting exactly where you are now.

01 / What The Trial Actually Did

Fifty-five men took part. Half were given five consecutive weeks of pelvic floor exercises with biofeedback and lifestyle advice, plus daily exercises at home. The other half received the lifestyle advice on its own. At three months the exercise group had improved significantly on the erectile function scale. The advice-only group had not changed at all.

02 / Where They Ended Up

After six months, with the control group crossed over onto the same programme, 40 percent of all 55 men had regained normal erectile function. A further 34.5 percent had improved without reaching normal. Around a quarter saw no improvement whatsoever, and you should hold that quarter in mind before you start expecting miracles of yourself.

03 / Why It Works At All

The muscles of the pelvic floor sit beneath the base of the penis and are understood to contribute to holding blood in place during an erection. That is a mechanical job, and mechanical jobs tend to respond to strength work. The authors concluded that pelvic floor muscle exercises and biofeedback are an effective treatment for men with erectile dysfunction.

Take it back today

I owe you the size of this. Fifty-five men is a small trial, it is one trial, and those men had a specialist and biofeedback equipment that you will not have in your kitchen. A quarter of them got nothing out of six months of effort.

You should also treat this as an addition rather than a replacement. Erectile trouble can be an early signal of vascular disease, so squeezing a muscle is not a reason to skip the blood pressure check or to put off the conversation with a doctor for another year.

I want you to find the muscle today. Sitting down, tighten as though you were stopping yourself from passing wind, without clenching your buttocks and without holding your breath. Hold for three seconds and release for three. Eight of those, three times a day, is a sensible place to begin.

You have been treating this as a plumbing problem with a pharmaceutical answer. Forty percent of those men got there with a muscle and six months of patience. Do the first eight of them tonight.

— Travis

Insider Member's Corner

6 free habits for the muscle nobody mentioned:

Invisible work deserves a visible reward.

01 / Wool · A proper Aran sweater

Hand-knitted on the Aran Islands off the west of Ireland in undyed báinín wool, with cable and honeycomb stitches that were originally a family's own pattern. It weighs about two pounds, it is genuinely warm in wind that goes through everything else, and it improves with twenty years of use. Buy one from a maker rather than a gift shop, and buy it a size larger than you think.

02 / Ride · A Brompton

Made in London, folds in about fifteen seconds to something you can carry onto a train, and rides far better than a folding bicycle has any right to. It solves the last two miles of a commute and it lives in a hallway cupboard rather than a shed. Men buy one reluctantly and then become slightly evangelical about it. Get the six-speed if there are any hills at all.

03 / Glass · The Boulevardier

Bourbon, Campari and sweet vermouth, stirred over ice with an orange peel. It came out of 1920s Paris and it is the Negroni's older and warmer cousin, better suited to October than to July. Use a rye-heavy bourbon and do not be tempted to shake it. One is civilised. Two is a decision you will revisit at three in the morning.