Staying active is key to good health, but how do women with incontinence exercise?

If you’re worried about an embarrassing accident or you simply can’t exercise without leaks, it’s difficult to even think about getting involved in healthy activities.

You’re not alone. Women all over the world suffer from different types of incontinence. You can still be active, with our helpful tips for managing incontinence during exercise. 

What is Incontinence?

Continence refers to your ability to control your bladder and bowel, so incontinence is the opposite—the inability to control your bladder or your bowel. This involuntary loss of control may cause urine leakage or stool leakage.¹

Urinary incontinence is more common than fecal incontinence, and it takes different forms:

1. Stress incontinence: urine leaks when your bladder is pressured, like when you cough, sneeze, laugh or lift something heavy, or when you’re exercising. Also known as stress urinary incontinence or SUI, this is the type of incontinence that prevents many women from being active. 

2. Urge incontinence: urine leaks because you experience a sudden, intense urge to go. This is also referred to as overactive bladder.

3. Overflow incontinence: urine leaks because your bladder doesn’t empty completely, causing frequent or constant dribbling of urine.

4. Mixed incontinence: urine leaks due to a combination of more than kind of incontinence, usually stress and urge incontinence.

5. Functional incontinence: urine leaks even though you have normal bladder control, because you have a disorder that prevents you from getting to the bathroom in time. For instance, if you have arthritis you may not be able to move quickly, or you may have trouble unbuttoning your pants in time. 

The type of incontinence that most often impacts women when it comes to exercising is stress urinary incontinence or SUI. It’s estimated to impact anywhere up to 35% of women, and that number could be greater as there’s likely a gap in reported rates.2 

There could also be a greater number of women with SUI, because many don’t seek medical attention, for a variety of reasons. Some women feel it’s too mild to seek treatment, or they’re embarrassed about it, or they’re worried they will need surgery. 

It’s also believed that the number of women who will receive treatment for SUI will increase in the next number of years, in part because of increased awareness and the availability of nonsurgical therapy to treat it. Numbers will also increase because of the number of aging women. 

While incontinence is not a normal part of aging, getting older is one of the risk factors of SUI, and it’s estimated that the number of women over the age of 60 will increase by over 80% in the next 30 years. 

Other risk factors include obesity—also on the rise in recent years—and smoking, either directly or indirectly by causing smoking-related illnesses that result in increased coughing. 

There is some connection to pregnancy and giving birth, although some researchers say this data is inconsistent. Pregnancy and childbirth do have an impact on the pelvic floor.² 

Other factors include chronic coughing, surgical procedures and menopause.

Managing Incontinence During Exercise

So if you have incontinence, how can you exercise? Here are some tips that can help you stay active despite your leaks.

1. Exercise for Your Pelvic Floor

The main cause of stress incontinence is weakened pelvic floor muscles. What is the pelvic floor? This is the structure of muscles and ligaments that act like a hammock, holding your pelvic organs in place. The pelvic floor also controls your bowel and bladder. Weak muscles create problems with bladder and bowel control.

You can do something about those weak muscles and enhance your pelvic health.  

One of the most powerful techniques to strengthen pelvic floor muscles is known as Kegel exercises. To perform these exercises, you contract your pelvic floor muscles for 3 seconds and then release the muscles and relax for 3 seconds. It’s important to make sure you’re exercising the proper muscles, so you may want to check with a doctor or physical therapist to ensure you’ve got the correct technique. 

There are tools available to help, like Gynesis. Gynesis pelvic floor trainer shorts support women to take control of their pelvic health with a simple, effective, external, and accessible solution.  Using advanced technology, Gynesis delivers targeted muscle stimulation with Kegel exercises that helps retrain and rebuild your pelvic floor—so you can achieve stronger bladder control and with confidence.

Research has proven that pelvic floor exercises help keep pelvic floor muscles “fit,” and can be used as an effective treatment for women suffering with stress urinary incontinence.

You can also seek pelvic health physical therapy. A therapist will determine a treatment plan based on your symptoms and the severity of your incontinence. 

Examples of pelvic health physical therapy include exercises to stabilize and strengthen your core, behavioral modifications like dietary and lifestyle changes that could help relieve symptoms, biofeedback to retrain pelvic floor muscles, and an at-home exercise program.

Some of our other tips for exercising with incontinence are helpful in managing your symptoms. Performing regular pelvic floor muscles exercises are intended to eliminate those symptoms, by addressing the root cause—weakened pelvic floor muscles. 

In fact, women should not wait until muscles are weakened to start performing Kegels on a regular basis. A strong pelvic floor provides a measure of prevention against pelvic dysfunction like SUI, and other conditions like pelvic organ prolapse. 

Women as young as those in their 20s can include these exercises in their regular routine, along with other good pelvic health habits like not smoking, keeping a healthy weight, avoiding straining when you poop or holding your urine too long, and not getting constipated.

2. Prepare to Exercise

Since many of the acts of exercising cause leaks, such as running or jumping, you can take steps to prepare for your exercise time:

• Try limiting how much you drink before you workout, while still staying hydrated. One drink to avoid is anything with caffeine, since it can irritate the bladder and make accidents more likely. You may know of other irritants that bother you, like spicy foods. 
• Hit the bathroom just before you workout. 
• Ask your doctor about training your bladder. This can take different forms, like tracking how often you go, scheduling bathroom breaks, and trying to extend the time between bathroom visits. 
• Go to the bathroom mid-workout if possible.
• If you find that high-impact activities make leaks more frequent, look for exercise programs that include low impact workouts, like swimming. 

3. Use Tools to Prevent Leaks

Don’t skip exercise just because you’re embarrassed about your leaks. Instead, take steps to make it possible to workout even with a few leaks. 

Here are some tools you can use to prevent leakage:

• absorbent pads
• a pessary, a vaginal insert designed to help SUI
• a urethral insert, a small tampon-like disposable device inserted into the urethra to act as a barrier to prevent leakage

4. Seek Medical Advice

One of the best steps is to ask your doctor for advice on managing incontinence during exercise. Some consider taking medicine, but there are plenty of options beyond medications that can help, including referral to a physical therapist and guidance on pelvic floor exercises. 

Depending on the severity of your condition, you may opt for a surgical procedure to strengthen those pelvic floor muscles. There are non-invasive procedures available that can help. SUI and other forms of incontinence can take a toll on your mental health. Don’t suffer in silence. Seek medical attention for your incontinence so you can stay healthy, physically and mentally.  

See A Doctor 

If you suspect you have incontinence, use our Physician Finder to find a doctor near you with expertise in women’s health. You can obtain a proper diagnosis of the type of incontinence, a treatment plan if necessary, and advice on exercising with incontinence that can help keep you active. After all, physical activity is good for your physical and mental health.