You can start practicing just with your fingers — I find it easiest with two. Put your fingers in your mouth as far back as you can without gagging, and leave them there for a few moments, breathing through your nose. It’s important that you don’t go so far as to make yourself gag — I’ve heard that this can actually strengthen your gag reflex, so go slowly.

I found the breathing the most challenging part of it, so practicing with my fingers in this way helped a lot with that. Doing this every day made a huge difference after only a week or two. A big tip that I’d give is that you shouldn’t take a big breath in before trying to deep throat — in hindsight, that’s something that I would often do, and it made things harder. What actually got me started practicing this was that I saw someone who could go all the way down and basically hold a large cock in their throat for an extended time — far longer than one could do in one breath. That made me realise that I needed to focus on being able to calmly breathe through my nose at a regular rate.

If you want to move to something larger, a softer jelly dildo can be useful to practice on, I’ve heard, but I found that practicing with fingers was sufficient.

When you’re actually going down on someone, note whether their penis has a curve to it, as many does. When I had a partner who had an upwards curve, I found that I needed to approach it from the direction of their stomach (so either lounging on the bed beside them, or straddling their chest). A downward curve makes it much easier to approach from below, which is convenient if you’re kneeling and your partner is standing.

I also found it useful to actively try to relax my throat muscles. It was hard for me to know what a relaxed throat felt like at first, which meant that I found exercises like this helpful. I also found that when I was being too ambitious when practicing with a partner, my throat muscles becamenless relaxed. That’s why I found it useful to practice with fingers: I had as much time as I needed to practice until things became automatic, rather than having to worry about putting on a titillating performance for a partner.

An auxiliary tip that’s useful in general for blowjobs is that you can use your hands to sort of simulate deep throating by stimulating the base of the penis at the same rhythm as what your head is moving at. This also makes it easier to gradually working up to taking more of the penis in your throat, in your own time (the last thing most people want is to end up puking on their partner, after all)