What Is Stress Incontinence? - Episode 5
In this episode, I discuss what stress incontinence is, what causes it, and what you can do to manage it.
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Dr. Kari: You. Welcome to the Morron Pelvic Health Podcast. Hi, I'm your host, Dr. Kari Roberts. On this show, we will be discussing a variety of things regarding your pelvic health. These conversations will be a mix of education, personal experiences, and a blend of tips you can apply to have a healthier pelvis. The goal of this show is to normalize conversations around pelvic health and help women stop suffering in violence. Today's episode is all about stress incontinence. What is it? Where does it come from? How can you overcome it? And I am going to be going off the top of my head every time I sat down to write notes for this episode, it just didn't seem quite right. So I said, we're just going to do this. We're going to do this and see what happens. So, stress incontinence, as I talked about in last week's episode, the three different types of incontinence. Side note, we're on a little bit of a bladder health journey for the next couple of episodes. And then after that, we're going to switch gears to something else. But these episodes all kind of go hand in hand. So with stress incontinence, it's basically when there is a change of pressure and your bladder gives way, basically. So the change in pressure so that change in pressure is something, a change in your abdominal pressure. So your pelvic floor is a group of muscles at the very bottom of your hip area. Kind of when you're sitting, you're kind of on top of your pelvic floor. And if the pelvic floor is the floor, then the diaphragm is the ceiling. And so that cavity in between our abdominal cavity is where there can be changes. So when we have a change of pressure, if our muscles don't respond to the pressure like they're supposed to, then pressure will escape at the weakest link, if you will. Now, just because you have pressure escaping at the pelvic floor, it doesn't mean that it in and of itself is weak. But if you think about it like a sports team, everybody's got to play their part. I love sports. I just finished watching the NBA Finals and there were some guys, they just weren't that great. It doesn't mean they're not professionals. It doesn't mean that they're not at their elite level. It just means cohesively with their team, they just fell a little short. So sometimes that happens. The pelvic floor is a much smaller group of muscles compared to your abdominals and to your diaphragm, and it's under gravity. So it makes sense that if the pressure is going to give, it will give towards the pelvic floor. So when there's a change of pressure in our interabdominal cavity, then we could experience and we experience urine leakage, then that is stress incontinence. When the stress changes and our body doesn't adapt to it, we get leakage. So common times is running, jumping, lifting, exercising, laughing is a big one. Laughing jumping on the trampoline, women that maybe pelvic floor has been impacted. Something that might seem to be a lower impact activity may not even seem like a big activity. But reaching over to lift a baby, reaching over to get groceries, moving a piece of furniture, all of those things, if our pelvic floor and our abdominals and our back and our diaphragm doesn't work together, then that pressure is going to escape, which will be through the bladder, which is urinary stress incontinence. Now, a lot of urinary stress incontinence has to do with the lack of coordination. Like I was saying with the basketball team, you've got a group of I was watching men's basketball, so I'm going to say men, a group of elite athletes and they're all doing their job. They've all been training for months and months and months. But every once in a while someone might be off his game. Right? And the other members on the team will have to pick up the slack if they want to win the game. Right? So that's what happens with our bodies, our pelvic floor. It may not necessarily be weak, but it might not be coordinated with the other members of the team. So what happens is our abdominals grip a little bit more, our diaphragm braces a little bit more. We might have some extra pressure in our lower back. And as those squeeze and squeeze and squeeze to take up the pressure or take up the Psych of the pelvic floor, what ends up happening is it inadvertently puts more pressure on the pelvic floor. So now we've got a change in stress and now its buddies are putting a little bit more pressure on it. And the pelvic floor sits at the very bottom, which means everything else sits on top of it. So gravity is pulling down as well. Now, we can't make you hang upside down and live the rest of your life so that gravity is not an issue. But what we can do is change the way the partners work, right? Making sure that everybody on the team is working the way that they should so that they can complement each other. So it's not one person on the team is doing all of the work and the other ones are just riding along, getting weaker and weaker. No, we can work with pelvic physical therapy for all members of that team to get coordinated, get on the same page and work together. Now, this stress incontinence could in fact be a result of weak pelvic floor muscles. I'm not ruling that out. It can definitely happen. So if there are weak pelvic floor muscles, then there are different techniques that we can do in pelvic physical therapy to help those muscles get stronger. If those muscles are too tight and maybe as the pressure changes, it just doesn't have enough give, then you can also get stress incontinence again, those are things that we can deal with in physical therapy for the pelvic floor. So that, in a nutshell, is what stress incontinence is and what we can do to make it better. Notice I'm not talking about a bunch of medications. I'm not talking about a bunch of extra things. Most of what we do in physical therapy is getting those muscles to a get coordinated, b stretch out if they're tight, or c get strong if they're weak. If you would like to have a consultation to see if a you have stress incontinence, and B if physical therapy can help you, I would love to hear from you. There are physical therapists that specialize with pelvic dysfunction all over the country, all over the world. Of course, I would love for you to contact me and see if maybe I could be of service to you. I do in person visits in the Atlanta area. I also accept virtual visits across the globe. So I just want you to think about that. I hope this episode was helpful. I will be coming to you next week to talk more about some incontinence issues. So thank you very much and see you next time. Thank you for listening to the Marrone Pelvic health Podcast. If you want to take the quiz to see if you would benefit from speaking to a Pelvic Health physical therapist, simply go to the link in the description or go to WW dot moronepelvichealth.com quiz. Again, thank you so much for listening to the podcast. And don't forget to tune in next week for another amazing episode.