MONDAY, Mar. 19, 2012 — We’ve all heard it a zillion times: exercise is good for you. In addition to helping stave off heart disease, diabetes, depression, and just about every other ailment under the sun, exercise gives you a healthy glow and just makes you feel great. For some women though, working out can make them feel really good — as in so good they reach orgasm, right there in the gym.

Most often linked to abdominal exercises, the phenomenon commonly known as “coregasm” might sound fanciful, but Indiana University researchers say in a newly published study in the journal Sexual and Relationship Therapy it is indeed very real.

After hearing stories for years of women overcome with pleasure while working out, study co-author Debby Herbenick, co-director of IU’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion, decided to make a more formal investigation. She and her colleagues recruited 370 women, ranging in age from 18 to 63, to complete an online survey about their experiences. The group represented women who’ve had so-called exercise-induced orgasms (EIO) and the slightly-less-intense exercise-induced sexual pleasure (EISP).

Herbenick and her team found that, true to the “coregasm” moniker, ab exercises were the most likely to bring on orgasm, with 51.4 percent of respondents saying they’d reached climax during the past 90 days while performing a core workout. But other forms of exercise also did the trick, with significant percentages of women indicating weightlifting, yoga (the oft-discussed “yogasm”), cycling, and even walking, as triggers.

Of course, not all the women surveyed are so pleased that a trip to the gym to feel the burn ends up feeling like oh so much more. Many reported being self-conscious when exercising in public, and 20 percent reported they could not control whether they had an orgasm or not.

In a press release, Herbenick says she and her colleagues aren’t exactly sure of the physical mechanisms linking exercise and women’s orgasms, but hope that their study leads to further research. She notes that legendary sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues recognized the exercise-orgasm connection in the course of their research in the 1950s. “But aside from early reports by Kinsey and colleagues,” Herbenick says in the release, “this is an area of women's sexual health research that has been largely ignored over the past six decades."

As to questions whether regularly performing “coregasm” exercises could help improve women’s sex lives, Herbenick isn’t ready to say yay or nay. But in a 2007 interview with Men’s Health she cautioned women about trying too hard to satisfy more than their desire for better health during their workouts. "If an orgasm just happens to occur while using good form, that may be an added bonus," Herbenick said. "But I would advise women not to pursue an orgasm at the expense of proper form.”