Everything You Need To Know About Kegel Exercises

May 18, 2018

If you’ve ever been pregnant, then you’ve likely heard of kegel exercises. They’re simple to do and are commonly recommended to strengthen the pelvic floor muscles that support the uterus, small intestines, and bladder to make pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum less difficult. However, Kegel exercises aren’t just a pregnancy thing.

The pelvic floor can weaken and cause incontinence following abdominal surgery and muscle strains or due to chronic coughs and obesity. And, most everyone experiences such weakening with age. Even men can suffer the effects of weakened pelvic floor muscles.

Kegel exercises are basically a series of contracting (clenching) and relaxing the pelvic floor muscles situated between your hips. This muscle group serves to support your digestive; urinary; and, for women, reproductive organs. It acts almost like a hammock to hold all the organs up and away from the vagina.

When pelvic muscles weaken, you may experience anything from stress incontinence, or urine leakage, from a simple sneeze, laugh, or cough. The urge to urinate may be strong and sudden. Even bowel movements and gas can be impacted by leakage, frequency, and urgency when the pelvic muscles are weakened.

If weakened pelvic muscles continue, you may experience pelvic organ prolapse, which is where your organs begin to droop down into the vagina.

As mentioned earlier, pregnancy places a great deal of added weight and pressure on the abdominal floor. Birthing processes further add to weakening of the muscles. Obesity acts in a similar fashion. Certain surgeries, chronic constipation, excessive straining, and chronic coughing can impact the muscle’s strength and conditioning. It’s also a natural part of the aging process.

In any of these cases, the result may be bowel and/or bladder leakage and incontinence issues.

The first step is to ensure you’re contracting the right muscles. You can easily identify these muscles by stopping your stream of urine midstream - the muscles used to cut off the flow are the pelvic floor muscles. Alternative identification methods are to tighten the muscles that you’d use to keep from passing gas or inserting a finger in the anus (males) or vagina (females) and squeezing the finger without tightening the thighs or buttocks.

Now that you’ve identified the muscles, replicate the ‘stop urine” contraction in a laying position when you’re not urinating. You’ll hold the contraction five to 10 seconds and then release for five to 10 seconds, repeating the process for three sets of ten repetitions.

These exercises restrengthen the pelvic muscles with virtually no side effects or counter indications.

Remember to breath normally and isolate the pelvic muscles in the contraction, meaning do not contract the abdominals, thighs, nor buttocks . Only use kegel exercises during urination to identify to muscles; routinely performing kegel during urination can lead to incomplete bladder emptying and infections.

It can take a few weeks or months, depending on the state of the muscles, before you begin to see improved urinary and bowel functioning. Have you been doing or need to be doing kegel exercises? Tell us your story or thoughts in the comment section.

Our content is created to the best of our knowledge, yet it is of general nature and cannot in any way substitute an individual consultation with your doctor. Your health is important to us!