I've gotten into sounding these last six months and feel I've mastered it. It's a lot trickier to Do It Right than you might think, although all the tricks are fairly obvious once you know them.

The #1 risk is getting an infection in your bladder, not injury. You can minimize the risk of infection by not letting the sound go into the bladder, and by being very careful about hygiene. Hygiene includes: playing in a clean environment; sterilizing the sounds before use; using sterile lube in individual packets, not from a tube that might become contaminated; cleaning the penis, glans, and meatus with disinfectant wipes; using a sterile syringe to pre-inject lube into the urethra; and wearing exam gloves while doing all this.

Injury? Not really an issue: after you inject about 5ml of lube into the urethra, pinch the meatus shut with one hand and use the other to massage the urethra from underneath and push the lube along its whole length. Insert about one cm of the sound, then let go of it, just using a couple of fingers to keep it from falling to one side. The sound should never be pushed or forced into the urethra: just let it slide in under its own weight.

You should also use the thickest sound that you can take easily; be careful not to force when trying different sizes; you might tear the meatus if you do. Most men take a sound somewhere in the range Fr18 to Fr30, with perhaps a majority taking Fr22 or 24.

The kind of sound you use makes a difference. I use the Dittel sounds, which are straight and have a flat paddle handle. I find the J-shaped Van Buren sounds much more difficult to introduce into the urethra.

Write me for further discussion if interested.