The First Day of Dicksmas: kGoal Review

Welcome to the first day of the second annual Days of Dicksmas! In this blog series, I will review a bunch of products, generally sex toy and sex toy related. They won’t all be dicks, but the name “Dicksmas” works, so I’m sticking with it.

For the first day of Dicksmas, I’m reviewing a product that is not, in fact, a sex toy. It goes in your vagina, and it vibrates, but it’s not designed for sexual stimulation. I’m talking about the kGoal pelvic floor strengthener. Readers, I wish this kGoal review were more favorable, but it wasn’t right for me. It turns out, there might be medical reasons for this! Stay tuned, and find out the various reasons why I can’t really evaluate the kGoal.

Background Info

Confession time: I’ve had this kGoal for over a year. I first requested it after seeing it in a store, possibly Babeland. At the time, the company didn’t have any review copies available, but they had me contact them again in the fall. I did, and they graciously sent me a kGoal for review. Now, I review the products I receive within 90 days, but this situation was different. Why did it take me so long to review? Well, I’ll get to that.

The kGoal is a pelvic floor strengthener from Minna Life. The pelvic floor refers to the muscles all up and around your vagina and urethra. They’re related to bladder control and sexual wellness, and to strengthen those muscles, you do kegel exercises. Doing kegels involves clenching and releasing the muscles used to stop pissing yourself. The kGoal is a device that fits in the vagina, and it communicates with your smartphone or tablet to let you practice your kegels. It’s an exercise machine… for your vag.

Out of the Box

The kGoal comes in a round tube decorated with an image of the product. It’s pretty cool-looking.

Once you slide the tube apart, you see the device standing on its plinth like a tiny teal silicone statue.

The packaging is very attractive. I’m a big fan of the polka dots, and the blue color is pleasant. I appreciate vaginal devices that aren’t overtly “girly.”

This is what you get overall in the packaging: the kGoal, the charging cable, a storage bag, lubricant, and instructions.

The kGoal itself consists of a bulb to go into the vagina and a “control arm” that remains outside the body.

The control arm has a button on the front, which is what you hold to turn the device on and off. You also push this button to set the pressure sensor to “zero,” like when you zero a scale. That tells the device, “this is me not squeezing,” so it can create a baseline from which to measure your strength.

The charger plugs into this gray silicone port on the top of the control arm.

The control arm is very flexible, as you can see.

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The bulb of the kGoal inflates and deflates by a silver valve on the bottom. You push the button in with a fingernail while squeezing the bulb (this is a two-hand job for me) to let the air out.

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The idea behind the device is that you deflate it fully, insert it into your vagina, and then re-press the valve again to let the air in. It is supposed to fill up to the right amount to just fill your individual vagina. 

Here’s what the kGoal looks like deflated. The top of the bulb is fixed; it’s a hard, rounded dome to hold the device’s shape.

In this picture below, the kGoal is deflated. That’s the fixed size. 

App Snafus

The kGoal operates through an app, for which you create an account. The app connects to the kGoal via Bluetooth, and from there, you can set up your workout goals, reminder preferences, and also vibration of the device. You can determine if you want “feedback” (i.e. vibration) for the squeeze bulb, the control arm, both, or neither. 

Here’s where things began to go wrong for me. I have a Google Pixel, and the app for Android just… wasn’t working right. I would connect, and then the app would crash. I’d get a workout started, and then the app would crash. So I’d log out and log back in, and the app would crash. Maybe I’d start a workout, and the Bluetooth would disconnect. And on and on. I did manage to complete a handful of pelvic workouts, which I’ll discuss later, but the app was a crapshoot.

I contacted support early on, who were incredibly nice throughout the whole process. That’s one big plus: support was responsive and friendly. They suggested all sorts of things: connecting manually via the Bluetooth menu instead of the app, reinstalling the app, and they even sent me a different VERSION of the app in an executable to try and connect. That worked, but each time I closed the app, it would never work again. I would have had to uninstall and reinstall the app every time I wanted to use the device.

The solution they offered was to try it using an Apple-based device, which they even offered to send me, but at the time, I was pretty fed up and I set the device aside. I did have an iPad mini, but I’d gone through a lot of work and I had just as soon set it aside.

Eventually, just last month, I picked up the kGoal again, feeling guilty that I’d never written the review. I installed the app on my iPad mini and successfully did a workout. Then, I went to use the app again at a later date and began to see the same problems. First, it disconnected in the middle of my workout, kicking me back to the main menu and ending my workout after a minute. Then, it did the same thing again. Then, it just began crashing every time I tried to connect. I put the app back on my Pixel, in case the app had gotten better in the last year, and had the same problems as before. Not connecting, then crashing. I gave up and sat down to write this review.

The Workouts

When I could get the kGoal working, as I did a number of times, the workouts were interesting. There were two options at the start: shape shift and moving target. Now, they’ve added a third one: bricks.

In Shape Shift, you squeeze your muscles to open and close a little gap to let different shapes through. The app measures your control and strength. With Moving Target, the device tells you how hard to squeeze and how long to hold, with visuals, and measures your success. Bricks, the latest addition, requires you to squeeze your muscles to move the little slider back and forth to bounce the ball and break the bricks. It’s like that classic Brick Breaker game.

The kGoal app saves your scores, and so you can track your progress over time. I didn’t actually complete enough exercises to warrant any measurable change, but I imagine that it would be indeed noticeable over time.

Into My Box: kGoal Training

I did do some exercises with the kGoal, as I mentioned earlier. Other reviewers have found the kGoal uncomfortable to insert, but I did not have a problem. They do recommend you use water-based lube, which I recommend as well. I showed a pic of the circumference of the device above, so you can determine whether it looks like something your body can handle.

One thing I noticed, though, was that the kGoal barely inflated when it was inserted. I pushed the silver nozzle on the bottom and held it open, which allows it to fill with air, but when I removed it, barely any air had entered the device. Not sure if the flaccid nature (heh) would affect my readings, I inflated the device before inserting it. 

I mentioned the vibrators earlier. Those trigger whenever there’s pressure on the device, like from clenching your muscles. Well, just putting the device into my vagina had it vibrating. My baseline pressure was apparently too much for it, and it was registering that I was clenching. Fortunately, pushing that button on the control arm “zeroes the scale,” and it turns off the vibration unless I actively squeeze.

The exercises I did do, I was not very successful. I felt like I was squeezing a lot, but the scores for strength were really low. REALLY low. Apparently the “average” is a 5, and I’m way below that. This didn’t exactly line up with my experience: I know that weak pelvic floor muscles can cause weak contractions at orgasm and a bunch of other symptoms, but I have CRAZY strong orgasms. Also, I know from partners that I clench hard. I’ve fingered a girl who can practically crack a walnut, and I averaged my contraction strength at about 1/2 to 3/4 of hers. So… what gives? 

Turns out, there was something medical happening here that I didn’t fully understand, and that, readers, is why the kGoal doesn’t work for me. 

About My Box

For obvious reasons, I don’t do an “about my box” section in normal posts, but this requires some information. I’ve been having low back pain, specifically tailbone pain, for almost a year now. About six months ago, I started seeing a chiropractor after some time away from one, and then about three months ago, on my chiropractor’s referral, I began seeing a physical therapist.

During these months of physical therapy, my therapist began honing in on my actual problem, including identifying a clear internal issue but uncertainty on what it was. As she began to zero in, she was asking me about things like pain during intercourse, difficulty with urination, bowel movements, incontinence, etc. I mentioned the “sometimes I pee a little when I sneeze, but not that much, and I’m working on my kegels” situation. 

She immediately commented that my pelvic floor wasn’t weak at all, but she was starting to think it was too strong. That strength, plus inflexibility, was tightening a lot of things up, including all the tendons connected to my tailbone. It’s also causing irritation of the pudendal nerve. I don’t have a diagnosis, but she’s giving me some stretches, and I’ve begun researching high-tone pelvic floor dysfunction in case that’s what I have. If I do have that, it means that my pelvic floor muscles are in a constant state of tension, and they never fully relax.

The Case With Kegels

It turns out, there are a lot of people who should not do kegels. These people, for a variety of reasons, have overly tight, inflexible pelvic floor muscles, and kegels can make the problem worse. I don’t know why I never knew about this. I pride myself on my medical knowledge, so I was shocked that there was an opposite problem to the weak pelvic floor. Pretty much everyone says do kegels forever, all the time. But there are some people for whom that advice is untrue.

I believe that aside from all the app problems, the reasons the kGoal wasn’t working well for me was that my muscles are already at half-clench. It would explain why the bulb wouldn’t inflate at all, because there’s outside pressure. It might explain why the vibrators were vibrating all the time, unless I zeroed them out. (But that might happen with everybody.) 

It also is another reason for why my scores came out so low despite my perception (and reported) strength of my muscle tone. If my muscles are already partially clenched all the time, they can’t go much further. Is it also possible my kegels are just weak as fuck? Yeah, but that seems less likely, given the other experiences. 

There’s definitely info on any device like this to check with a doctor before using if you suspect you have anything wrong. The thing is, I didn’t realize I had anything wrong. So maybe that’s an unexpected plus of the kGoal: it gave me more evidence toward a possible diagnosis.

Cheers and Caveats

Cheers to Minna Life for making a good-looking product designed to help people strengthen their pelvic floor. Cheers for attractive packaging and body-safe materials.

Cheers for an app that aims to track information over time and provides three games.

Caveat: Three games. I want more! I want to be able to shoot space aliens with my pelvic floor.

Bigger caveat: The app didn’t WORK for me, despite a ton of effort, and that sucks. 

Cheers: Customer service was super nice and easy to work with, even though they couldn’t fix my problem.

Caveat: the kGoal is splashproof, not waterproof, so you have to be extra careful when cleaning it.

Cheers: The vibrators on the device are nice, somewhat rumbly on the internal one if the external one is kind of buzzy. They don’t really press against me enough to get me off, but they’re still pleasant. 

Caveat: The bulb of the device is not small, and that isn’t ideal for everyone’s body, even if it worked for mine.

Biggest caveat: not everyone should do kegel exercises, and I didn’t realize that was true, and so I can’t use this toy at all. That’s not a caveat for Minna Life or for the kGoal. It just… feels like a caveat for me. 

Final Thoughts: But is it a good product?

I wish I could answer this question. People love this thing. There are a ton of reviews online praising it. People like tracking their scores and getting feedback. I bet I would like it, too. I just… can’t really use it. Even if the app were working, my own problems are keeping me away from kegels, so this is not a good fit.

More relevant, though, were the tech issues. When I couldn’t get it to reliably operate on either platform, both with their platform’s most recent OS, I lost interest. It might just be a weird fluke with my tech, but it might be the case with you, too, and you should keep that in mind.

Need to strengthen your kegels? The kGoal could be a great device for you, as it is for many other reviewers. Not sure if you might have a pelvic floor dysfunction? Go talk to a gynecologist or physical therapist. 

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