Leaking with Jumping & Exercise? You CAN fix it!
Do you struggle with leaking when you jump or exercise? You are not alone! In fact, up to 40% of athletic women struggle with leaking during their workouts or sport. Imagine that! We call the type of urinary leaking with exercise or movements “stress urinary incontinence.” Many women struggle with leaking when they walk, run, weight train, take workout classes, etc. We often see that women start to limit their exercise or avoid movements, like jumping, because of leaking issues.
Only doing kegels won’t resolve leaking!
What we often hear from our patients, is that they are told to “just do more kegels”, or where pads, or that their only option is surgery. All of these options may not provide full resolution. What if we told you that leaking issues with exercise and jumping is most likely NOT the pelvic floor’s fault? And that more kegels will not resolve the issue. We like to explain that kegels are a very isolated exercise for your pelvic floor muscles, and that only working a muscle in isolation will not resolve a problem that truly involves the whole body. It’s like telling someone who wants to get better at pull-ups, to only do bicep curls (bicep curl strength alone will not help them achieve that goal).
In this blog post, we will break down some of the most common issues that women leak with jumping and exercise and how pelvic floor physical therapy can and should be a first line treatment to help you!
Anatomy of your pelvic floor
Your pelvic floor muscles sit like a hammock at the base of your pelvis and supports your pelvic organs, helps prevent against unwanted leakage, and can relax to help you urinate, have a bowel movement, or have sex. The pelvic floor muscles significantly rely on their surrounding muscles groups (like abs, low back, glutes, hamstrings, diaphragm, etc), to function properly. If the muscles surrounding the pelvic floor are not working well (too weak, too tight, imbalanced), the pelvic floor cannot do it’s job as well and can cause issues such as leaking! We need to zoom OUT of the pelvis to get to the root cause of your leaking.
Strengthening muscles around the pelvic floor
The muscles around your pelvis need to have adequate strength and symmetry to absorb forces from jumping and exercise. That is why, for many of our patients who leak with exercise, we are training a wide variety of exercises such as forward lunges, lateral lunges, single leg deadlifts, squats, etc, to help with optimal function. We want to stimulate the muscles and different forces that impact and jumping requires to help you get stronger and leak less.
The involuntary pelvic floor reflex
Part of our pelvic floor function (and a very important part!) is the “involuntary reflex system.” Let’s take walking as an example: when you go for walk, you probably are not peeing your pants throughout your walk. You are also not thinking about actively contracting your pelvic floor every second of your walk. This is because your pelvic floor muscles function involuntarily to help you stay dry! Now let’s break down jumping: during a jump, your pelvic floor is pre-contracting to prepare for landing without your conscious/voluntary effort to do so. What we see in women that leak with exercise vs don’t leak is that they may have a slower pre-contraction of their pelvic floor prior to landing from a jump.
This is another reason why doing only kegels (voluntary contractions of your pelvic floor) will not resolve leakage. To create full and lasting resolution, we need to design a comprehensive pelvic floor strengthening program, lower body strengthening program, and include jumping or impact exercises to strengthen the involuntary reflex.
No matter what stage of your life you are in, whether you have had a child or not, leakage with jumping is never normal. Schedule an appointment with a pelvic health physical therapist here at Awake Pelvic Health & Wellness in Woodbury, MN to evaluate your pelvic floor needs and to get you on a supervised jump or exercise progression program!
