Exercise and Desire: The Intervention Nobody Prescribes
There was a stretch in my early forties when I was building a company, raising small kids, and sitting down for roughly eleven hours a day. I told myself I was tired because of the kids. That was partly true. But I was also tired in a way that sleep didn't fix — the kind of tired where your body stops sending you signals, and you stop noticing that it's stopped.
What I remember most clearly is that desire didn't disappear dramatically. It just quietly stopped showing up. Brittney and I weren't fighting. Nothing was wrong on paper. I simply had no appetite for her, or for much of anything physical, and I assumed that was what forty-something looked like.
Then I started walking. Not training, not a program — just thirty or forty minutes most days, usually in the Richland Creek greenway area, usually with a podcast in my ears. Within a few weeks, something shifted that I wasn't expecting. I noticed her again. I noticed myself. The signal came back online.
I assumed this was a personal quirk until I started reading the research. It isn't a quirk at all.
The research is unusually consistent
Most topics in sexual health come with messy, contradictory findings. This one doesn't. A systematic review and meta-analysis published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, which searched the literature through August 2025, found that across the body of studies on exercise and female sexual function, 18 studies showed statistically significant differences compared to control groups and 20 showed improvement. The improvements weren't limited to one narrow outcome either — they spanned desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, overall satisfaction, and
reduced pain during sex
That's a wide net. Those six domains are essentially the whole map.
Frequency appears to matter more than intensity. A 2025 study in Sexual Medicine found that women who exercised at least once per week scored significantly higher on standard sexual function measures than those who didn't, with the prevalence of sexual dysfunction reaching 23.17% in the sedentary group. A separate 2025 global prevalence meta-analysis in BMC Women's Health stratified its findings by physical activity level and found the same directional pattern.
The men's research points the same way. A February 2025 systematic review in the European Journal of Applied Physiologypulled together fifteen studies on exercise and male sexual function. And a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials published in the Journal of Men's Health found something counterintuitive: for erectile function, lower-intensity exercise over a zero-to-three-month window was the most effective protocol, in the range of 90 to 150 minutes per week. The effect was most pronounced in men under sixty.
Ninety minutes a week. That's three thirty-minute walks. That is not a heroic ask.
Perhaps the most striking finding comes from a randomized trial published in JAMA Network Open in March 2025, which put 112 men with prostate cancer through a 150-minute-per-week exercise intervention. The men who benefited most were the ones who started with the lowest baseline desire and satisfaction.
Read that again. The people with the least desire gained the most.
Why movement touches desire
The mechanisms are not mysterious, and they stack.
Blood flow.
Arousal is, at its most basic level, a vascular event. Tissue engorges because blood arrives. Cardiovascular conditioning improves the efficiency of that whole system — which is why erectile difficulty is often an early warning sign for heart issues, not a separate problem.
Hormones.
Regular resistance and cardiovascular work supports healthier testosterone levels in men and more stable hormonal function across the board.
Nervous system state.
This is the one I think matters most and gets discussed least. Desire requires a nervous system that feels safe enough to want something. If you're running on sympathetic activation all day — low-grade threat, deadlines, cortisol — your body is allocating resources to survival, not connection. Movement is one of the most reliable ways to discharge that activation and shift into a calmer physiological state. It's also why a hard workout can leave you feeling more open rather than more depleted.
Interoception.
This is the capacity to sense what's happening inside your own body — your heartbeat, your breath, your hunger, your arousal. It is a trainable skill, and movement trains it. People who have spent years ignoring their physical signals often cannot locate arousal when it arrives, because they've lost the receiver. Exercise rebuilds the receiver.
Self-perception.
Not "getting in shape." Something subtler. When you have a regular physical practice, you start experiencing your body as yours rather than as a thing you drag around. That shift in relationship to your own body changes how available you are to be touched.
What this is not
I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where advice like this goes wrong.
This is not "lose weight and your sex life will improve." The research isn't about weight. The prostate cancer trial wasn't measuring body composition — it was measuring minutes of movement. Shame-based fitness advice reliably backfires in intimacy work, because shame about your body is one of the main things that suppresses desire in the first place. Adding more shame doesn't help.
This is also not a prescription to become an athlete. Several of these findings point toward moderate, consistent, lower-intensity movement as the sweet spot. Overtraining can suppress the same hormonal systems you're trying to support.
And it's not a replacement for the relational work. If there's unresolved resentment in your marriage, no amount of cardio will fix it. Movement raises the floor; it doesn't rebuild the house.
What I'd actually suggest
Start absurdly small and aim for frequency over intensity. Twenty to thirty minutes, four or five days a week, at a pace where you could still hold a conversation. Walk Shelby Bottoms. Walk your neighborhood after dinner. Get on a bike.
Add two short resistance sessions a week if you can — twenty minutes of basic strength work is plenty to start.
Then track something other than weight. For a month, note on a scale of one to ten how much physical desire you noticed that day. Not whether you had sex. Just whether you noticed wanting. Most people who do this are surprised by the pattern that emerges within three or four weeks.
And if you can, move with your partner sometimes. Shared physical activity does double duty — it raises both nervous systems toward a more connected state and it creates the kind of novel, slightly challenging shared experience that research has long linked to relationship vitality.
The reason I keep bringing this up with couples is that it's one of the few interventions in this entire field that is free, has no side effects, and improves about nine other things in your life at the same time. Nobody prescribes it because it isn't glamorous. It just works.
If desire has gone quiet in your relationship and you want help figuring out what's underneath it, book a free discovery call. We'll talk about what's actually happening — body, nervous system, and relationship — and what a path forward could look like.
And if you want a practice that works on the nervous-system side of this, Coelle offers guided audio intimacy experiences designed to help couples slow down and get back into their bodies together. It pairs well with movement: one gets you out of your head, the other gets you into connection.
Scott Schwertly is a Nashville-based sex and intimacy coach, founder of Coelle, and co-host of Do You Feel That? with his wife Brittney.
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