Another question we often get asked by men in our practices is, how can we improve the strength of their erection? Young guys and old guys are both frequently asking us this question. We usually try to avoid pharmacological options initially and we try to maximize everything else we can do to optimize the strength of the erection. This includes things like making sure you’re getting enough sleep, making sure you’re getting enough exercise specifically a high intensity interval training seems to be the best option when it comes to maximizing the erection.

There is some research that adopting a plant based diet can actually improve erections as well. So either greatly reducing your meat or adopting a straight vegan or vegetarian lifestyle may help your erections as well. Avoiding excessive recreational drugs and alcohol can certainly improve your erections as these can affect them both acutely and chronically with excessive use. It’s also important to optimize your health when it comes to risk factors such as diabetes, hypercholesterolemia and hypertension, as all these three issues can cause damage to the blood vessels and reduce erectile ability over time.

Once patients have done all of these things that they can, that’s reasonable for them to do and they're still having issues with erection, then at that point it’s very reasonable to start looking into pharmaceutical options. Initially we usually start with like sildenafil or viagra or one of their closest cousins as these usually give good effects for people with some mild erectile dysfunction. If these aren’t effective then there are some other options as well that are a bit more involved but usually we’re able to use some of the medicines that we have at our hand to achieve good quality erections in the vast majority of patients.

Sometimes the erections are really not organic at all, and it’s really more phycological. In that case often speaking with a sexologist can really help iron out some relationship issues or confidence or anxiety issues that may be affecting the ability to get erections and that make a huge difference in a lot of patients.