Question: “Is it safe to do pelvic floor exercises while wearing a tampon?”
Answer from Dr. Daniel Gruber, urogynecologist from Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington D.C., part of John Hopkins medicine.
You can even use tampons to help facilitate your exercises if you can feel the tampon end, which most people can’t. If you feel a little something there, it can actually help with the squeeze, and you can pull it like you’re pulling it up and in. Again, like we mentioned before, it’s difficult sometimes to know if you’re squeezing correctly.
Remember, you can’t see your pelvic floor muscles like you can your arm muscles, for example. If I told you to move your arm, your eyes could see if your arm was actually moving or not, and you’d know the muscles were working. But with the pelvic floor, you don’t get that feedback.
So, one option you can try is to take your thumb and put it into the vagina, on the back wall of the vagina, and then squeeze. Feel if you’re actually squeezing correctly, because there are some people who can’t coordinate the squeeze very well. They can do Kegels for years without it making a difference or helping at all. So, that’s why it’s important to either use this thumb trick or to have somebody check to make sure that you’re actually doing the exercises properly. A pelvic floor physical therapist can really help you if you don’t coordinate correctly.
If you are coordinating very well, then you do have excellent pelvic floor strength. Depending on your scenario, you don’t necessarily have to see a physical therapist. And you can definitely do exercises with the tampon and you might find it helpful.
