73 | Struggling with Urinary Incontinence

Today I'm talking about the common mom problem: leaking urine when you cough, laugh, sneeze, or jump.  Although this is a common problem for mom's it is not normal and there are things you can do to begin moving through this time better.

Outline

What is incontinence? What can you do about it?
0:00

Urge incontinence.
1:57

How often should you go to the bathroom?
4:08

The pelvic floor works with the diaphragm.
6:17

Things to pay attention to with stress incontinence.
8:44

What can we do for tight pelvic floors?
10:46

Meditation to help with tight pelvic floor.
12:08

Know that you don’t have to live like this.
14:12

Also check out our course:
Control your Leaking

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Today I want to talk to you about incontinence. What exactly is incontinence, it is that leaking of urine that you deal with when you cough, sneeze, laugh, or maybe when you go out for a jog. And this has been told to us, as moms, that it's common that everybody you know, this is something you just have to live with after having children. And I'm here to tell you, you don't have to live with this. This is common, but it is not normal. This is not something you have to live with. This is something that we can fix. And why I want to talk to to you about raising healthy humans, is because if you constantly feel like there are certain things you can't do, for fear that you're going to leak urine, then what is that for your children, whether it be you don't laugh, or you hold in that sneeze, or you won't go play with them, or jump rope or you know, do the fun stuff with them, because you're worried you're going to be leaking. That's not fair, it's not fair to you, it's not fair to your children. So I want to be able to let you know, there are things you can do to change that. Incontinence has a lot to do with your pelvic floor health. And depending on whether you have tight pelvic floor, or weak pelvic floor may be affecting your incontinence. So I want to go over two things with you when it comes to incontinence, we've got urge incontinence and we have stress incontinence, they are two different things. And they're going to be handled differently. So the first one is urge incontinence. And that is where you feel like you have to go to the bathroom a certain time of day. Maybe it is one of those things where before you leave the house, you have this sudden urge to go the bathroom. Well, that's something that you probably have done to yourself, because of maybe you're leaking or something. So this is where you empty out so to speak. Before you leave the house, you're training your bladder to empty out before it's full. So therefore it stops knowing when it's supposed to go the bathroom, right because it waits till it's full, then it provides information to the brain saying I'm full. And then that's when you have the need to go the bathroom. But if you are always going to the bathroom, like before you leave the house before it's full, then it messes up its signaling. And it starts to signal rapidly or you know, at different times of the day because it doesn't know that it's supposed to signal when it's full. So urgent continence is one of those things, it is completely a retraining process. All you do is you work on retraining your bladder to allow it to get full. And I will usually recommend to my clients to start small. If you notice, you have to go the bathroom and you think I just went to the bathroom like 30 minutes ago, I don't need to go, then you're going to try to redirect your mind. So it may mean going and doing something else. Or another thing you can do is like three quick key goals like you're flicking your bladder. So if you think like flick your bladder with the muscles with the pelvic floor muscles that may kind of re direct that sensation, and see how much longer you go. It is normal for us to go to the bathroom every two to three hours. So if you notice that you're going to the bathroom every hour and you're not you know changing up anything with your drinking habits or anything like that, then this is something you should practice. The other thing I do want to mention is if you are one of those people who drinks two cups of coffee in the morning and then also goes and grabs a smoothie, and then you have a glass of water. Do you know that you've had a ton of liquids first thing in the morning you're going to be more apt to go the bathroom quicker. So that might be a situation of Yes, you do have to go to the bathroom before that two or three hours is up. So just be cognizant of that when you are working with urgent continence, the other thing you may notice is for those of you who when you get home from either work or you know, get home from that, bringing the kids home from school, whatever. And you notice that you have to go to the bathroom real quick at that time, but it's every time you get home from whatever you have to go the bathroom, that's probably another urgent continence situation. And that, again, needs to be redirected, maybe go out, grab the mail, go grab the trash cans, take them out, whatever you know, think about something that you can do to delay that urge sensation to help kind of work on redirecting the brain, that not every time I get home, from driving my car, do I run in my house and go to the bathroom. The other type of incontinence is stress incontinence, and this is going to be due to your pressure system. So you've probably if you've listened to me for any period of time, you've heard me talk about posture, and breathing. So our pelvic floor works with our diaphragm. Your diaphragm is a muscle, your pelvic floor muscles are muscles, and they work together. So if you are taking shallow breaths, you are not working your diaphragm effectively, which in turn is not working the pelvic floor effectively. So my shallow breathers out there, do know that when you are not practicing full breaths, you are not actively working your pelvic floor, which could lead to incontinence. So we want to work on taking nice deep cleansing breaths, it does not need to be something that you are always taking, you know, deep breaths, it's not like that. But it is something where the more you focus on getting that 360 breathing that I've spoken about many times, when you practice working on that, that's going to help you to work to be able to work that core properly, to where it is creating the proper response of the pelvic floor. So if you do not deal with, say pelvic floor prolapse, what you can do when you take a deep breath in, you want to think expand your ribs, 360 fashion, and you're gonna think about that breath tapping down on that pelvic floor. And then each breath out, you're gonna think, starting the breath out from the pelvic floor. And if you practice this about three to five times, every single day, so maybe in the car, when you're driving to the grocery store, we don't drive to the grocery store every single day, what do we do every single day? Well, for those of us with older kids, I would say, you know, if you've got to go pick your child up at school, you can do it then. But you know, think about something you're doing every single day, we stack it with a habit just like I always recommend, and you can work on creating that. Practicing your breath, that pelvic floor, breathing, 360 breathing, dropping that breath deep into the pelvic floor, and then pelvic floor response as you empty the breath out. So that would be one thing. There are a couple of things you need to pay attention to with incontinence as well. So we have stress incontinence due to pressure that's going to be your leaf, you're laughing, coughing, sneezing, you may have where you go out for a jog. And then at you do fine, you do great all the way up until like maybe the two mile mark or something and then you start to leak a little bit. That would be that the pelvic floor is not trained, so to speak for endurance or something might be happening within your body posture really, were at about that two mile mark, you start to get tired and you change your position and your body which then creates some leaking. So posture becomes very important to help with that. Stress incontinence as well. And many people will mention to you if you are dealing with especially the more endurance style incontinence So why don't you just start doing key goals do more key goals. Here's the problem. key goals are great for those of you who have weak pelvic floors. But some of you have tight pelvic floors. And if you have a tight pelvic floor, and you're working on key goals, all you're doing is tightening it up more. So if you notice that when you go, or when you are working on key goals, maybe you've been told, or I'm sorry, maybe you have incontinence, and you've been told that you need to start practicing key goals to work on strengthening the pelvic floor. And you do that and it gets worse, then that is tight, pelvic floor. So what can we do for tight pelvic floors? One, I would recommend seeing a physical therapist, that is going to be very important, because they can go in internally and work on releasing. And you might be squeamish about that. But here's the thing, other countries, they kind of require this to occur before they let you go. Here in America, we don't require this, our doctors don't provide us any health of the pelvic floor. And our pelvic floor is involved in so much more than just, you know, some intercourse and having babies and things like that. It is really important for us to make sure that we are strong in our pelvic floor. For other reasons too low back pain, SI joint issues, hip pain, you can even deal with knee and foot issues due to weak pelvic floor. So it's really important that we are you'll hear me say it over and over and over again, look at our body as a whole and don't separate any one thing from another. And then the other thing that you can do if you deal with tight pelvic floor is meditation, you need to work on relaxing, you need to maybe go into like a happy baby pose or legs on the wall kind of in a squatted position. And just breathe and relax. And that's going to help release that pelvic floor. If you have a weak pelvic floor, then you can start working on strengthening through key goals and other things. Now I do want to let you know that if you are interested, I have a program. And you can look that up. It is called control your leaking. And it's going to kind of go through some of the things that I've mentioned here about whether it's stress or urge incontinence and then provide you with exercises and tips based on which one you have. It also goes further into breathing, providing you exercises to help you with your breathing, and then also into posture, things that you can do to help stop putting that pressure down on the pelvic floor, which might be in turn creating some of that lead leaking that is occurring. So hopefully this information helps you let me know if you have any questions, I'm happy to help answer them for you. But understand that you do not have to live like this incontinence is, is weak muscles or tight muscles. I mean, it's just like any other if you're dealing with back pain, or you know, shoulder tightness, there are things that you can do to relieve that stress or strengthen that muscle. So know that you don't have to live with this. There are some times where it is more than just an exercise program will offer. A lot of times it has more to do with either a level three or higher prolapse. And then also for if you deal with really tight pelvic floor, maybe where it goes up into the psoas is really tight then you would probably need internal releasing from a pelvic floor therapist, but there are for some of you just practicing your posture and breathing is going to help tremendously. So again, like I said, if you have questions, feel free to reach out to me, I'm so happy to help answer your questions, you know, maybe I can get on a call with you to see if we can work through things like this, you know, maybe it is something that we can work through, or maybe I can refer you on to someone in your local community. But you do, I want you to know, you do not have to live like this, this is not something you're going to have to deal with forever, if you are willing to take on the, you know, take on the exercising, and really being an active participant in your recovery. So I hope this information provides you some something that you can take with you. And if you don't have incontinence, and you listened all the way to this point, please share it with a friend or you know, let people know that there is something you can do because I feel like us as moms, we tend to really feel uncomfortable about this. But when you're in like a class with other moms, it starts to come out and you start to see that this is something not only you are dealing with this is this is so common in my classes. I have a lot of moms who deal with leaking, so just know that there are things you can do. It does take time, but if you are consistent, you can stop the leaking of urine. I hope you all have a wonderful day. And remember to keep moving