Alex Grendi often ponders a question most people have never thought to ask. Namely, why is it so hard to access expert education on how to make our sex lives better?
“The assumption is that, without any kind of study, without being given any insight, everyone should just automatically be good at sex,” he says. “While we have trainers for the gym and therapists for our minds, we don’t think to apply the same kinds of thinking to something that can be such an important part of our lives. When I tell people I’m a sex coach, nine times out of 10 the reaction is, ‘Wait, you’re a what?!’”
Grendi has been in practice for five years now, one of a new breed of sex coach specializing in working exclusively with men, typically to address their complex sexual anxieties. He came to sex coaching through his own experience. “Even before I was sexually active, I had this deep fear about how it could all go wrong, perhaps from the pressures of popular culture,” he says. That the topic was so taboo didn’t help, either. He still can’t, he notes by way of example, market his services on Facebook or Instagram in the year 2024.
“Sex for me was a matter of shame, fear and embarrassment, and stayed that way for the next 15 years.” He self-medicated with marijuana and alcohol — useful excuses when sex failed to go well — until he decided to get clean and seek help from a sex coach himself. “Learning how to think about sex differently was the most life-changing experience of my life,” he says.
What sort of men seek out Grendi? Often high-achievers — with high expectations for every aspect of their lives — and over-thinkers, concerned about their perceived lack of staying power and poisoned by the unreal ideal of sex, what Grendi calls “the performance mindset,” a false idol promulgated by pornography and insufficiently countered by effective sex education.
This isn’t about their egos. Often his clients are locked into the negative self-image that, for example, their premature ejaculation is a product of just the way they’re made, that they’ll have to live with it. “But nearly always their deepest concern is that they can’t satisfy their partner,” he stresses. “They don’t want to last an hour, but just five or 10 minutes, long enough to enjoy sex and connect with their partner.”
Men Aren’t Asking Women Questions on Dates. It’s a Problem.
“The cashiers at Trader Joe’s ask more questions than guys on dates nowadays.”Grendi finds there is a lot of myth-busting to do. For starters, there’s the idea that women habitually orgasm through penetration alone (studies suggest only 15% do so regularly), or what Grendi calls the “orgasm gap,” the idea that men have more orgasms more consistently than women, which in some sense makes them selfish. “In my experience, it’s the total opposite. I find that when it happens for my clients, many of them don’t actually get any pleasure from ejaculation, such is their anxiety. Women may understand that there is something amiss but are typically not that bothered by it. I don’t think they understand how much this anxiety plagues some men.”
There is a lot of convincing to do too. What Grendi prescribes over a year-long program (some examples below) is, he says, not easy for many of his clients to embrace, given their conditioning. They don’t get that in order to pleasure a partner, they need to connect with their own pleasure first — there’s a yin and yang at play that works best when they understand their own sexuality.
But he insists it works. “Of course, not everyone needs a sex coach,” he says. “But everyone would benefit from one. They may well have a great sex life already, but it could be a better one. That’s why I think there can’t be enough sex coaches. We have the potential for so much more sexual pleasure.”
Below, Grendi shares six ways men can start to work towards that sexual potential.
Address Your Stress
“So many of my clients are at nine or 10 with their stress levels all the time,” says Grendi. And that’s bound to negatively affect how they feel during sex — whether they’re distracted, hyper-aware or just unable to relax. To help, look after your physical health first: Eat well, exercise, get plenty of sleep and commit time to winding down.
Stop Watching Porn
Porn doesn’t just set (literally) unreal performance standards, encouraging regular viewers to either come to sex already overstimulated or end up under-stimulated by the actual act, it also creates bad ideas of how it should be done. “I often find my clients have sex in ways I’d advise them not to — they think it has to be hard, fast, deep, balls-to-the-wall style, which is not necessarily want women want,” says Grendi.
Connect to Your Body
Grendi says that before clients learn how to better appreciate their partner’s needs, they need to learn to connect with their own body in new ways. “Invariably that means disrupting the pattern of self-pleasure, as just being sat in a chair, one hand on your genitals, eyes on a screen…that’s not sex at all.” A process of what Grendi calls “body mapping” sees clients learning to feel comfortable touching everywhere but their genitals, and learning to find their own bodies sensual in different ways. “This often feels very strange to men. There’s some resistance to connecting to our own bodies,” he suggests. “But why should it be considered weird to, for example, touch your own chest?”
Learn to Breathe
Grendi admits that many of the key concepts of good sexual practice are ancient ones. “When people first started talking to me about ‘sacred’ or ‘tantric’ sex or Daoism, it was all a bit too woo-woo for me. But they’re actually simple ideas once they’re made practical for modern men,” he explains. Learning to breathe efficiently — big belly breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth with an audible sigh — is, he says, about learning to pause, to be intentional and get into the right state of mind for sex. Focused breathing can be used throughout sex too. “What I’m really trying to get men to do is to slow down, to be sensual as well as sexual, to be in the moment.”
Reconnect to Your Genitals
“It’s not all about ejaculation as some kind of end goal,” says Grendi. Rather, he advises his clients take a long time learning to appreciate the wider sensory feedback of touching their genitals by building up stimulation, modulating it and, as he puts it, “ride the peaks and troughs of sensation. It’s about knowing the limits of your arousal.” It’s that much easier to pleasure a partner if you know what works for you too.
Talk During Sex
“To give your partner more pleasure, to understand what feels good for [them], you need to both give [them] time and space and actually ask the question,” Grendi says. “After all, no two people are the same: what one person finds incredibly sexually sensitive barely registers with another.” That would be obvious, were it not that sex is invariably muddled by misleading presuppositions: that, for example, the only talk allowed during sex is the “dirty” variety. “Men also often think that they shouldn’t make sounds of pleasure during sex,” he adds. “They want their partner to do so but the assumption is they shouldn’t do so themselves.” But this in itself is another form of communication.
“You have to communicate during sex,” he stresses. “The bottom line is that your sexual pleasure is your own responsibility. It’s not your partner’s job to fix things. But in a relationship you want to support each other in an open and loving way, right? And you can’t do that without sharing what works for you both.”
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