Pelvic Floor Exercises

What are pelvic floor exercises?

Pelvic floor exercises strengthen the muscles around your bladder, bottom, and vagina or penis.

Strengthening your pelvic floor muscles can help urinary incontinence, treat pelvic organ prolapse, and sometimes prevent the need for pelvic floor rehab.

Everyone can benefit from doing pelvic floor exercises, especially women who have recently given birth.

Find your pelvic floor muscles

You can feel your pelvic floor muscles if you try to stop the flow of urine when you go to the toilet.

It’s not recommended that you regularly stop the flow of urine midstream as it can be harmful to your bladder.

Pelvic floor exercises

To strengthen your pelvic floor muscles, sit comfortably and squeeze the muscles 10 to 15 times.

Do not hold your breath or tighten your stomach, bottom or thigh muscles at the same time.

When you get used to doing pelvic floor exercises, you can try holding each squeeze for a few seconds.

Every week, you can add more squeezes, but be careful not to overdo it, and always have a rest between sets of squeezes.

After a few months, you should start to notice results. You should keep doing the exercises, even when you notice they’re starting to work.

To find out more about how to do pelvic floor exercises, check out these videos below.