Here's how you can spice up your sex life!

Bored with your sex life? Well, then sensate-focused sex is the name of the game for you.

The nice, slow lovemaking where all you do is focus on your sensations, is the new mantra to renew your sex life as you rediscover each other.

Sensate-focused sex exercises involve a series of behavioural practices, which offer variety and increased personal awareness through basic touch.

Originally developed by sex researchers Drs William Masters and Virginia Johnson, sensate focus exercises involve each partner paying increased attention to their own sensations when stimulated.

Particularly for couples in sex therapy, the exercises have helped lovers to overcome issues like performance anxiety, rapid ejaculation, lack of orgasm and erectile dysfunction.

The benefits of sensate focus include, discovering new types of touch, spine-tingling sensations, increased comfort with physical intimacy and better awareness of your lover's body as well as your own.

Apart from these, going for such exercises can help couples to strengthen their relationship, and also guarantees no fear of failure, better sex communication and heightened sexual excitement.

With such non-demands and pleasuring exercises, couples do not make sex goal-oriented, instead, they enjoy the experience of being with one another, touching and feeling each other's bodies.

These highly structured touch activities are about enjoying physical contact to the fullest without trying to arouse each other and should not be mistaken as a form of foreplay, because it is the main experience in itself.

Done in several stages over time, they are tailor-made to a couple's specific issues when working with a sex therapist, reports Fox News.

Couples in therapy are usually advised to abstain from having intercourse while focusing on the physical sensations triggered during sensate play.

This not only alleviates anxiety and mental distractions that lead to sexual difficulties, but also offer up a greater awareness of the wide range of stimuli that encompass all of the senses.

The rules for sensate focus sex are:

1. Breasts and genitals are off limits for the first few sessions.

2. Verbal feedback is limited unless you're uncomfortable or in pain.

3. Do not try to elicit sexual response (but don't sweat it if it happens).

4. After each session, be sure to process the experience.

When pursuing sensate focus exercises, set aside at least 60 uninterrupted minutes in a warm bedroom and one may even enhance the setting with soothing music and candles.

If it helps, take a bath (or anything else that relaxes you). Take your time, over several "dates" and finally get on with the sessions.

Sensate focus sex could establish new ways of relating to each other and partners may find themselves having some of the best sex of their lives.

The details of sensate focus sex make part of the book Touch Me There! A Hands-On Guide to Your Orgasmic Hot Spots by Dr Yvonne K Fulbright, who is a sex educator, relationship expert, columnist and founder of Sexuality Source Inc.