WakeUp Pelvic

Reminder #4:

Taking a good care of ourselves is what drives us to feel confident and happy. It's not a one-off that counts, but rather a routine that we live in. Would you change something in your daily routine?🧘‍♀️

Incontinence affects every person differently - It's a fact! 🤭

The problem can range from an occasional minor leaks to urgent and often runs on to the bathroom. There are two most common types of incontinence:
🔸 Stress Incontinence - leaks experienced when sneezing, coughing or being physically active
🔸 Urge Incontinence - caused by sudden and a strong need to p*e

The role of the pelvic floor muscles is to provide structural support and help maintain continence. 🌿 Therefore any disorder of these muscles would result in instability of the pelvic organs (prolapse) and incontinence.

Common symptoms:

➿ Pelvic pain;
➿ Discomfort during s*x, difficulties in achieving an or**sm;
➿ Feeling pressure, heaviness or bulging (prolapse);
➿ Bowel problems (i.e. flatus or faecal incontinence).

If you have any of these symptoms, we recommend you to visit a pelvic floor physiotherapist or your family doctor, so you can start treatment. 🏥

Many women with pelvic pain and urinary incontinence go untreated because they don’t realise treatment is available. 🤷‍♀️ Instead of sharing about the problem with their friend, sister or a doctor, they suffer from the discomfort for years just to keep the issue private. 🥺 Can you relate?

Stress urinary incontinence is …

With mild stress urinary incontinence, pressure may be from sudden forceful activities, like exercise, sneezing, laughing or coughing. If your stress urinary incontinence is more severe, you may also leak with less forceful activities like standing up, walking or bending over. 🏃‍♀️

Urinary 'accidents' like this can range from a few drops of urine to enough to soak through your clothes. 🥺 This can lead to many uncomfortable social situations - from wetting yourself while running to catch a bus, to being restricted in sports activities. Some women reduce doing the sports they love or quit these activities altogether. This is just not right, because majority of urinary incontinence cases are treatable and you do not have to live with the discomfort!✨

Did you know that urinary incontinence is common among women who do impact sports? Volleyball, gymnastics, horse riding and any sport involving running and jumping can aggravate urinary leakage. 🏃‍♀️ These experiences can cause frustration and embarrassment, and some women even stop their sport activities altogether. 😔 This isn’t right! We should not accept restrictions and discomfort in our daily lives. Let’s take action and resolve urinary incontinence together!💪 Do you know someone who stopped doing the activities she loves because of urinary incontinence?🤔

Fact or Myth? 🤔

Pelvic floor muscles work 24/7.

It’s a fact! 🌸 Pelvic floor muscles work non-stop in order to support our organs and to prevent any leaks - even when we sleep!

We cannot accept the silence any longer. ⚡️ Our health issues are not shameful - they are just like any other health issues.🌸 This is the time to make a change and to change the taboo culture around women’s health. By opening up about these topics, we are breaking the years of embarrassment and lack of help that our mothers and grandmothers have experienced. We are the women who are taking the step towards accepting a woman’s body as it is.💃

Have you ever felt embarrassed to talk about pelvic experiences?

Fact or Myth? 🤭 Pelvic floor muscles are only for people who have leakage or other pelvic issues.

It’s a myth! ✨ Everyone (women, men and children) has pelvic floor muscles and they are extremely important. They control our bladder and bowel outlet and play a crucial role in our s*xual function and pleasure. They also work with other core muscles to stabilise our spine and pelvis. If they are not working as they should, we find out about it through the symptoms such as leakage.

Reminder #3:

Learn to love yourself. Learn to treat yourself. Learn to take care of yourself. And be happy with the best version of yourself. 🌸

It is a common misconception that women who are physically active and fit, do not experience urinary incontinence issues.🏃‍♀️ This is not true! We have spoken with dozens of women who do sports every day - they go for long walks with their dogs, do yoga, hiking, train at the gym… and still experience urinary incontinence. 🤭

This is because exercising larger muscle groups does not mean you are exercising the pelvic muscles. Pelvic muscles need a bit of special care.😇 Unfortunately, most of us have not been informed of the importance of pelvic muscles and how to strengthen them, so while we train the rest of our body, pelvic muscles get weaker because they are not trained.

But there is good news! It is pretty easy to take care of pelvic muscles once you learn how to activate them and how to do special exercises regularly.💪 This includes Kegels, breathing and posture exercises.💆‍♀️

Are you physically active?💃

The pelvic floor muscles play an important role in s*xual function in men and women. In women, pelvic floor muscles attach into and around our cl****is. While they help with sensation and tone, they also need to be relaxed enough to allow pain-free penetration.🌸 Let’s consider or**sm. Or**sm requires a rhythmic contraction and relaxation of the pelvic floor muscles. If your muscles are too tight or you are not practicing relaxation coordination with or**sm, this can weaken your or**sm or even prevent it from occurring. ✨

Beauty is what follows a happy person. Beauty is when inner yourself is satisfied. Nobody is authorised to define your own beauty.☀️

You are not alone!✨ There are more women than you think who experience the same, and this is something that impacts their daily lives too. We just don’t talk about it and we get on with our lives… without finding a solution! Urinary incontinence silently creeps into our lives and slowly starts restricting our daily activities. It takes away our confidence bit by bit, until it becomes a new normal. We have spoken with women who have stopped the sports they love, such as running and cycling, and women who even stop traveling and attending events. Have you ever had this before at least once?🤫

Common causes of pelvic floor dysfunction:

🔸 Constipation, straining on the toilet
🔸 Repetitive sneezing, nose blowing or coughing
🔸 Repetitive vomiting
🔸 Pregnancy and childbirth are two key life transitions where pelvic floor dysfunction is highly likely. This is due to pelvic floor muscle stretching or pelvic floor muscle tearing or trauma
🔸 Holding or pulling in your tummy constantly
🔸 Risk factors such as diabetes, obesity and smoking can also cause pelvic dysfunction
🔸 Other common causes include menopause, ageing process, trauma etc.

Reminder #1:

Take a deep breath. Or two. Or more. 😮‍💨

In the hustle of daily life, it can be difficult to take a step back and focus on ourselves. 🤭 But always remember that it is essential for you and the body.🌿 ☀️

Are there any ladies who were told by a gynaecologist that the only solution is surgery? 🥲

Firstly, let’s acknowledge - surgery is one treatment for incontinence, primarily for stress urinary incontinence. However, surgery is likely to be the last option to be considered when other treatments did not work. So our question is - has your doctor advised to try other methods, such as exercises to treat urinary incontinence? Have they referred you to a pelvic physiotherapist?🌼

Our advice is that it is best to see a pelvic physiotherapist who will provide you with all the information and a plan for your treatment. Also stay tuned for the pelvic training app which we are building - it will be packed with useful information and tips. ⚡️

Have you been told by your doctor that the only solution is surgery?🤔

Pelvic floor muscles - what are they? 🤔

We are used to talking about having strong legs, abdominals, arms and other muscles. If they are strong, we consider the person to be fit. 💪

However, there are some other important muscles in the body which play an important role in us being able to have an active lifestyle - and they are not visible from the outside! Pelvic floor muscles are extremely important - they support our internal organs (in women it’s usually the bladder, re**um and uterus), they control when we p*e, poo and pass wind. 🌿 They attach into and around our cl****is so they play a huge role in our s*xual satisfaction and pelvic pain. They also work with other core muscles to stabilise our spine and pelvis during activity. Many functions of the pelvic floor (like p*e and poo) are things that we rarely think about until something goes wrong!

Did you know about the big role of pelvic floor muscles in our bodies?✨

Throughout generations women have not fully understood how their bodies work. Our mothers and grandmothers were taught to keep quiet about reproductive health topics as they were considered ‘shameful’. 🤫 Period, p*e, poo… Embarrassing to talk about them?🤷‍♀️ These are essentials to every woman’s life!🌿 Sorry to make anyone uncomfortable, but if either of those areas does not function well, the quality of your daily life is likely to deteriorate.

Hello to all the amazing ladies!🌸

Quite some time ago, I discovered one and very uncomfortable topic - urinary incontinence. It all started with my cousin's pregnancy. Before and after giving a birth to her son (and my lovely godson!) she had experienced incontinence. That is when she really freaked out and did not know what to do. She felt alone and she did not have the information on what was happening with her body. ‘Why is my body not working anymore?’, she asked me.
Eventually she managed to treat it with regular exercises and I am more than proud of her for that. But I really feel it is not fair what she had to go through.
I believe that no one should feel alone and without access to proper health advice and information - especially for treatable conditions such as urinary incontinence.
Each woman has the power within to tackle it and to get rid of it, we just need to support each other and know how to reach our goal.
With this in mind we are on a mission to create an app for women who want to treat or prevent urinary incontinence. We are working with Swiss pelvic physiotherapists to achieve this and we will be excited to share the progress of our journey with you. This community is a safe space where you can speak up, ask questions and learn from others’ experiences. In addition, relying on certified physiotherapists’ advice, we will provide you with useful information about treating urinary incontinence.
Thank you for being here!✨
Ieva & Ugne

Online community uniting women to break the taboo of pelvic health, together 🌿