Kegels are muscle strengthening exercises just like exercising in the gym,
if you overdo your kegels, you can make some pelvic floor problems much worse. Hi I'm Michelle
and today I'm going to be talking to you about how to know if you overdo your Kegels and what to do
for emergency management. Then I'm also going to go through how to know what to do to get
back on track with your Kegels after everything settles down. Now there's two main reasons that
overdoing your kegels can happen. The first one is doing too many exercises, so when Arnold Kegel
first recommended kegel exercises for women, he suggested up to 200 exercises a day. Now we
know that if you're doing a lot of exercises, too many exercises for example if I'm in the gym doing
200 of these a day it's going to make it really hard later in the day for those muscles to work
and that's the same with over training your pelvic floor muscles, so we need to do the right quantity
of exercises and I'm going to be going through that with you later in this video. The second
problem that can occur is over bracing or holding the pelvic floor muscles too tightly all the time.
So some of us, when we go to yoga or go to the gym just constantly over brace these muscles and
hold them all the time and unfortunately that can cause the muscles to become too tight and
painful and then they become weak and they don't work well. So what are some of the symptoms that
can occur? There's a range of things that might occur and this can vary from having pelvic pain,
lower abdominal pain, even lower back pain or pain in your tailbone or coccyx. So there's some pain
symptoms that can occur but other things can happen too. Your bladder control might
get a little bit worse, your prolapse symptoms might get a little bit worse
or you might find that you're really constipated as well. So there's a variety of symptoms that can
help you know if you're overdoing your kegels. Now what do you do if you're overdoing your Kegels?
Well the first thing is to stop them straight away. That's your first thing that you must do.
Now I'm going to take you through some positioning for emergency management and then we'll talk about
how to get back into doing your kegels correctly once your pain or your symptoms settle down.
So I'm going to demonstrate what you can do if you've got pain, pelvic pain from doing too many
kegels. The first thing to do is to lie down, as soon as you lie down you take the pressure off
your pelvic floor so I'll do some demonstration here. So if you're going to be lying down, it’s
nice to get one or two pillows underneath your knees and lie yourself back down comfortably.
So that would be your comfortable resting position and I can feel I could even do with another pillow
underneath my legs. Allow your legs to rotate outwards and just in that comfortable position
then you can do some relaxed deep breathing exercises and if you check out the audio above,
I talk about how to relax and do the relaxed deep breathing exercises for pelvic floor relaxation.
Now the second thing that can be really effective is to use a warm pack. Now I've got a large pack,
warm pack here but I'm just using this for the purpose of the demonstration. You might like to
find a lightweight warm pack. You could place it over your lower abdomen. You could also place it
over your pelvic floor and you can lay that there for as long as it feels comfortable for you, up to
20 minutes at a time, just using the warmth lying down and your relaxed deep breathing exercises.
The other thing you can also do is take some pain relief. You might have some
pain relief from your doctor such as a muscle relaxant if that's the case if you've actually
over tensed your muscles or you might be able to take something like tylenol or paracetamol
that you can get over the counter. So there's some ways for your emergency pain management
just to relax the pelvic floor muscles and get rid of pain immediately. Now let's talk more
about how to resume kegel exercises. Okay so how do you get back on track with your kegels
once you've rested? Obviously you rest until the pain has settled down, the discomfort is settled.
There's no point in starting your exercises while you still have any discomfort or your symptoms.
Now again start your exercises lying down so let's go through the way to start your kegels and
I’d just to mention too, one of the best things you can do is see a pelvic floor physiotherapist
to give you advice on your issue because there can be different types of reasons for overdoing your
kegels and different problems that can result. So it's really good to know what you're dealing with
and get a pelvic floor physiotherapist to help you along with your progress.
So if you're going to restart your kegel exercises, start them lying down again so you're
not having to exercise against gravity. So in the position we just talked about you might
have a pillow underneath your knees or you might just have your legs in that position.
So that when you restart and if you're not sure how to do your kegel exercises my video above
shows you the correct technique, I'm not going to go through all that today, but if you refer
to that in the link below you can also learn how to restart your kegel exercises correctly.
So in your relaxed position you start with one to two pelvic floor contractions and you do
them really gently. So what you do is you contract the pelvic floor gently and then you relax it down
and then you take the time to rest and I'm going to emphasize relaxing the muscles
completely so really let them go down, do your deep breathing exercises between the
between each exercise, so that you're really relaxing your pelvic floor.
Rest for 30 seconds to a minute between each exercise before you're doing your next lift
and lower and relax, and we're not going for long holds, we're just going for short
brief contractions. So that's the position that you would start those in. So you can
do those once a day, so start them once a day and the next day just monitor your symptoms,
see what's happening, see whether it's exacerbated any problems or seeing
whether everything's settling down. If it has, if everything is settling down, then the next day,
so you might leave a day of rest the next day. Then do another couple of exercises and monitor.
If everything's okay then you can start to slowly increase the number of repetitions you're doing
until you can get to eight to ten exercises in a row. Now once you can get to the eight to ten
in a row, then you have a break and then you can start to increase your sets. So you might
do eight to ten exercises in the morning and you might do then another eight to ten
exercises later in the day. Now once you can get to your three lots of exercises during the day,
so that's about 30 exercises a day, 10 10 and 10, then you start with your strength and strength
contractions. So you don't add strength or strong contractions until you know you can lift and lower
and relax completely and that you're doing those pain-free. So we've talked about quite a bit there
haven't we. We've talked about the problems with overdoing your kegel, doing too many kegels or
holding them on constantly, and then we've talked about some of the symptoms you can feel, and then
finally we talked about your emergency management and then how to resume your kegel exercises So I
really hope this information helps you understand how to cope with overdoing your kegels if you've
found it helpful, it really helps other women find the video if you can like the video below.
So I'd really appreciate if you could like it and I really welcome your comments. I'd love to hear
your questions about this issue so please feel welcome to leave those questions in the comments
below. Thanks so much for watching today. I look forward to seeing you next time. Bye for now.