Am I making my pelvic floor problems worse?

I feel like all my clients are finding things are changing at the moment and I do wonder if the warmer weather might be affecting how we are all feeling. The main one reported this month has been pelvic floor … well, unreliability. It’s not an all-out issue, but just a bit of a leak here and there which means period pants are a must during high-impact exercise.

Just to reiterate what you might already know, peri-menopause can cause pelvic floor dysfunction even if you’ve never had it before. This is because the pelvic floor is made up of muscle, and with oestrogen loss comes muscle loss. This is why we talk about lifting heavy and eating more protein at this time of life; to help build muscle and to help hold on to what we have. It’s the same with our pelvic floor, and a lot of women over 40 find they need to start looking after it a bit more.

We go through a whole routine of things you can do – easy things – to maintain pelvic floor health in the Menopause Made Easy course, but here’s an easy one to start with: stop the ‘just in case’ pee. This is the pee you have because you’re about to leave the house. The pee you have because you’re about to go on a walk. The pee you have when you don’t actually need to pee.

It's a tough one to give up, it involves quite a few leaps of faith, but it’s so important to keep your pelvic floor functioning as it was designed to do. Without going into huge detail, peeing when you don’t need to sends your bladder the wrong message and starts to confuse it, so it’s not sure when you do or don’t need to go, ending up with weakness, loss of capacity and other issues.

So start with that, trust that you will be ok if you actually just wait til you do need to pee, to pee.

Jumping for joy WITHOUT leaking should be normal!