What importance does bowel health have on our pelvic floor and our bladder?
It's really important to think about your bowel in context with your bladder
because they're so close together. If you've got a bladder that tends to not
want to fill as well as you feel it should, and you get that urgency very
early in the cycle, or you find your bladder's very irritated, it's always
worth checking whether maybe it's the bowel putting pressure on the bladder and
if you're not emptying your bowel as regularly as you need to, or it's very
solid what's sitting in the bowel for long times, you can imagine there's not a
lot of space in here, so if you've got a bladder here and then the bowel behind
it and the bladder's trying to fill but the bowel's too full and in the way, then
you limit how far the bladder can go or the bladder and the bowel press on each
other on the bladder gets annoyed and says 'well I'm gonna have to have a
wee now'. So there's no rule about how often you should go but it should be
regular for you and comfortable and easy to pass. The things that influence
bowels the most are your fluid intake. So keeping enough fluid to keep the bowel
soft. Habits: a lot of women are guilty of always putting off going to the
toilet because there's always something else more important to do. So
establishing a regular toilet habit is one of the easiest things you can do
and then when you get to the toilet, we talk about three P's. The first one is
your position, so making sure that you sit with your bottom right back and
there's a lot of science to show that if your knees are higher than your hips
and then you lean forward that is kind of mimicking a squat position that
nature would have had us do otherwise. So you can put your feet up on a step,
you can use a child's step or you can buy a step that's designed to go around
the toilet seat neatly and get forward and lean, so your position and then
patience. I think we tend to rush trying to empty our bowels and
recognizing that those people that take a book in and spend a little bit of time
reading - what's happening there is by relaxing your mind and relaxing your
thinking, you allow your bowel to get on and do its thing by itself and it
needs time to empty. And then finally when it gets to pushing we don't want to
strain and by straining we mean holding your breath and pushing hard which is
kind of how you picture you should help, but when you hold your breath and
tighten up, without realizing it you tighten the muscles of the pelvic floor
just when you want them to relax to let everything out. So instead of straining
we talk about panting just going *pants* and being relaxed. I always think of when
you wind up a toothpaste tube, you're just gonna wind it up from behind and
let it push everything out gently so it's a *pants*, not a *strains*. I've heard of mooing too.
Or sighing like a *sighs* kind of feeling. So it's position, patience, and don't push
and better to do nothing, or to just pant, like they tell you to do when you
are pushing a baby's head out to pant. But it really is so important isn't it
for the pelvic floor and pelvic floor health? A lot of people find if they
improve their bowel emptying, a lot of their bladder symptoms can improve as
well. So it's really good to try and see if that's got something for you