What the science says about Ben Wa balls and vaginal cones

What the studies say overall

Studies on vaginal cones and weights, the objects most similar to Ben Wa balls that have been researched, were carried out with women with urinary incontinence and as a complement to pelvic floor training, not for pleasure.

A Cochrane review concludes that pelvic floor training appears effective in stress or mixed incontinence, and that the evidence on adding vaginal cones is limited (Hay-Smith et al., 2001).

A meta-analysis of trials with women with incontinence after childbirth found that supervised training with cones was more beneficial than individual training, while a review on urge incontinence found improvements with all physiotherapy techniques except cones (Chen et al., 2024; Greer et al., 2012).

In two small trials with women with stress incontinence, training with cones or with weights gave no clear differences in symptoms compared with training without them, although the weights improved muscle power in the pilot trial (Pereira et al., 2013; Bar Chen et al., 2025).

A review on pregnancy and the postpartum period concludes that pelvic floor training is effective when supervised (Mørkved et al., 2014).

Trials that compare cones with other techniques do not see clear advantages either.

In one with one hundred and twenty women with incontinence, around nine in ten improved with both the vaginal cone and biofeedback, with no differences between them, and a smaller one also found no differences between cone and biofeedback at six months (Seo et al., 2004; Sahin et al., 2022).

Only one trial, with thirty-seven women with stress incontinence, saw weighted vaginal balls reduce urine leakage more than pelvic floor exercises alone (Arvonen et al., 2001).

Two further reviews add caution: one on the postpartum period found only one valid study and describes the evidence as very limited, and another on non-surgical devices for stress incontinence concludes that cones are no more effective than traditional pelvic floor training (Oblasser et al., 2015; Burton et al., 2022).

Where they disagree

The results on cones go in different directions: one meta-analysis finds them beneficial with supervision and another review places the most effective protocol in the one that combines guided exercises, biofeedback and cones; by contrast, the review on urge incontinence finds no improvement with them, another recent review does not find them more effective than traditional training, and almost all the individual trials come out level with exercise without cones or with biofeedback (Chen et al., 2024; Oliveira et al., 2017; Greer et al., 2012).

Only one found that weighted balls reduced urine leakage more (Arvonen et al., 2001).

Limits of the evidence

The trials are small, with women in very different situations (postmenopause, postpartum, stress or urge incontinence), and one of the reviews dates from 2001 (Hay-Smith et al., 2001; Pereira et al., 2013; Bar Chen et al., 2025).

One of them points out that there is no consensus on which intervention works best, and the postpartum one found only one valid study (Malinauskas et al., 2023; Oblasser et al., 2015). None of these studies looks at these objects for sexual pleasure.

The studies, one by one

We have gathered 13 verified studies. Each summary is our own; the quotation in inverted commas is taken word for word from the original abstract, in English.

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