Improving your sex life comes down to a handful of factors that reinforce each other: physical fitness, stress levels, sleep, how you communicate with your partner, and how much novelty you bring to the relationship. Small, consistent changes in any of these areas can produce noticeable results, and the research behind each one is surprisingly specific.
Move Your Body Regularly
Exercise is one of the most reliable ways to improve sexual function, for both men and women. A review of 11 randomized controlled trials involving over 1,000 men found that those who did aerobic exercise for 30 to 60 minutes, three to five times a week, saw meaningful improvements in erectile function. In some cases, the improvement was comparable to what men get from prescription medications. The activities were straightforward: walking, running, and cycling.
The mechanism isn’t complicated. Aerobic exercise improves blood flow throughout the body, including to the genitals. It also lowers blood pressure, reduces inflammation, and boosts mood, all of which feed into better arousal and stamina. You don’t need to train for a marathon. Brisk walking counts, as long as you’re doing it consistently.
Strengthen Your Pelvic Floor
Pelvic floor exercises (often called Kegels) aren’t just for postpartum recovery. Strengthening these muscles improves sexual function in both men and women through a specific chain of effects. The training causes the pelvic floor muscles to grow stronger and improves their nerve signaling. This enhanced muscle tone supports better blood flow to the genitals during arousal, which increases lubrication in women and firmness in men. Stronger pelvic muscles also produce more powerful rhythmic contractions during orgasm, making climax feel more intense.
To find the right muscles, try stopping your urine stream midflow. Those are your pelvic floor muscles. Contract them for five seconds, relax for five, and repeat 10 to 15 times. Do this three times a day. Most people notice a difference within a few weeks.
Eat for Better Blood Flow
What you eat affects your sexual function more directly than most people realize. A long-term dietary trial found that people following a Mediterranean-style diet had a 56% lower risk of developing sexual dysfunction. Among those who already had issues, the risk of worsening erectile dysfunction dropped by 59%, and the risk of worsening female sexual dysfunction dropped by 50%. That study focused on people with type 2 diabetes, a group especially prone to sexual difficulties, but the underlying principle applies broadly: the foods that protect your heart and blood vessels also protect your sexual function.
A Mediterranean-style diet emphasizes vegetables, fruits, whole grains, olive oil, fish, and nuts while limiting processed foods and red meat. These foods reduce inflammation and improve the flexibility of blood vessels, which is exactly what healthy arousal depends on.
Get Enough Sleep
Sleep deprivation hits your sex drive hard and fast. A study at the University of Chicago found that restricting healthy young men to five hours of sleep per night reduced their testosterone levels by 10 to 15% in just one week. Testosterone plays a central role in desire for all genders, so chronic sleep loss can quietly erode your interest in sex without you connecting the two.
Seven to nine hours is the standard recommendation for adults. If you’re consistently getting less than six, improving your sleep may be the single highest-impact change you can make for your sex life. Keeping a consistent wake time, limiting screens before bed, and cutting caffeine after early afternoon are the basics that work for most people.
Manage Stress Before It Manages You
Chronic stress suppresses sexual desire through a direct hormonal pathway. When you’re stressed, your body releases cortisol, which activates your fight-or-flight system. That system is essentially the opposite of the relaxation state your body needs for arousal. Elevated cortisol shifts your brain toward avoidance and vigilance, making it harder to feel open to sexual connection. Over time, this creates a pattern where stress crowds out desire without any obvious “cause” you can point to.
The fix isn’t eliminating stress (impossible for most people) but building in regular recovery. Exercise helps here too, as do practices like deep breathing, yoga, or simply spending unstructured time outdoors. The goal is to give your nervous system regular opportunities to shift out of high-alert mode.
Talk About Sex With Your Partner
This is the factor people most often skip, and it may matter more than anything else on this list. Research on young heterosexual couples found that sexual communication predicted both sexual satisfaction and overall relationship satisfaction. Sexual frequency, by contrast, only predicted sexual satisfaction and had no effect on how happy people felt in the relationship overall. In other words, how often you talk about sex matters more to your relationship than how often you have it.
Sexual communication doesn’t require a formal sit-down conversation, though those can help. It means being willing to share what feels good, what you’d like to try, what’s not working, and what you’re curious about. It also means asking your partner those same questions and listening without defensiveness. Many couples avoid these conversations out of fear of hurting feelings, but the research consistently shows that couples who talk openly about sex have better sex and stronger relationships.
Try Something New Together
Desire tends to fade in long-term relationships not because attraction disappears, but because familiarity reduces the novelty that fuels excitement. Research grounded in self-expansion theory shows that couples who participate in new and arousing activities together experience increases in passionate love and relationship satisfaction. The activity doesn’t need to be sexual. One study used laser tag. The key is that it’s novel, slightly exciting, and done together.
This works because new experiences create a sense of growth and discovery that spills over into how you see your partner. You’re reminded that they’re a full, surprising person rather than a predictable roommate. Try a new sport together, take a class, travel somewhere unfamiliar, or simply break your weekend routine. The novelty you build outside the bedroom often follows you into it.
Practice Being Present
Distraction during sex is one of the most common barriers to enjoyment, and mindfulness training directly addresses it. A clinical trial on women with low sexual desire found that group mindfulness therapy produced large improvements across multiple measures. Sexual desire scores increased substantially (from an average of 16 to nearly 22 on a standardized scale), while women in a control group saw no change. Overall sexual function improved with a large effect size, and satisfaction scores rose significantly as well.
You don’t need formal therapy to apply this. Mindfulness during sex means noticing physical sensations as they happen rather than drifting into thoughts about your to-do list, your body image, or whether you’re “performing” well enough. When your mind wanders, gently bring attention back to what you’re feeling. This sounds simple, but it’s a skill that improves with practice, and the payoff is real. Even a daily five-minute mindfulness practice outside of sex can train the attentional skills that make you more present during intimacy.
Supplements Worth Knowing About
Most supplements marketed for sexual enhancement have weak or nonexistent evidence behind them, but one exception is arginine, an amino acid that helps blood vessels relax and widen. A meta-analysis found that arginine supplements at daily doses between 1,500 and 5,000 mg significantly improved erectile function compared to placebo, with odds of improvement more than three times higher in the supplement group. It works by supporting the same nitric oxide pathway that prescription erectile dysfunction medications target, though less potently.
Arginine is generally well tolerated but can interact with blood pressure medications and blood thinners. It’s also not a substitute for the lifestyle factors above. If your sleep is poor, your stress is high, and you never exercise, a supplement won’t overcome those fundamentals.