5 Ways to Save Your Bladder From Urinary Incontinence

Introduction to 5 Ways to Prevent Urinary Incontinence

Are you tired of peeing your pants or being handicapped to the bathroom out in public? I’m here to tell you that you’re not alone.

Urinary incontinence is one of the most common complaints my patients see me for on a day-to-day basis.

The truth is medications and wearing diapers will never address the real reason for having urinary incontinence.

In this post, I’m going to explain five different tips for overcoming urinary incontinence once and for all so that you don’t have to be handicapped to the bathroom or live your life in fear or distress.

Tip #1: Make Sure You’re Drinking Water

The first tip is to make sure you’re drinking plain water.

At least 50% of what you drink per day should be plain water, nothing added to it, and that should be about 50% of your body weight.

So, for example, I should be drinking about 85 ounces of fluid and about 50 ounces of that should be plain water because I’m 170 pounds.

Obviously, make sure you’re not drinking all of your water at once. Stagger that throughout the day from when you wake up and before bed.

A great way to get all your water in is to buy a water container that holds all the water that you need to drink for the day. Fill this up to your daily requirements and make sure you finish drinking it. This will ensure that you get enough water.

Tip #2: Consider Going to the Bathroom on a Consistent Schedule

The second thing to save your bladder is to make sure you’re going to the bathroom regularly.

Many people either hold their urine too long or don’t hold it long enough.

So make sure you’re going just in case.

The ideal amount of times we should urinate per day should be every two to four hours depending on what we’ve drank and what we’ve done.

And then make sure you’re going as needed.

So if you feel like you have to go and you haven’t gone in the last two hours, go to the bathroom.

Tip #3: Implement Yoga in Your Daily Routine

Yoga is a great way to move your body and stretch certain muscles while strengthening others. See my next tip below on how movement will manage constipation.

Yoga has been around for years but we use it with some of our urinary incontinence patients to help restore mobility to our hip, retrain our core muscles and breathing.

Yes! Believe it or not, proper breathing has a direct impact on your pelvic floor & when your pelvic muscles are weak, you have to go to the bathroom more frequently!

Some great yoga poses we like are the following:

• Downward dog
• Child’s pose
• Cobra
• Half-kneeling windmill
• Pigeon
• Frog

Tip #4: Manage Your Constipation

The fourth thing is to manage your constipation and this may seem counterintuitive but it’s true.

If you are constipated, that means there’s a lot of extra junk going on in here, which means a lot of extra pressure on your bladder, which means dysfunction there.

Some foods that you can consider eating that are high in fiber and that will help manage your constipation are:

• Oatmeal
• Prunes
• Flaxseed
• Vegetables
• Apples

On a side note, if you’re taking painkillers consistently, these will back up your bowels and can indirectly cause urinary incontinence.

Thus, if you’re not eating a well-balanced diet or are taking pain medication, your colon may be constipated.

Another way to prevent constipation is to just exercise or move. This could literally be anything.

We have a saying at Back In Motion that “motion is lotion”. This is true for regulating your bowel movements, too!

When we move or exercise it helps our gut pass and process our food better. This is called peristalsis. Therefore, if you’re sitting too much and not exercising enough your body will keep that food in your stomach and it is harder to have a bowel movement.

Tip #5: Urinate Fully

The fifth and final point is to urinate fully.  This might seem simple, but a lot of people don’t take enough time to urinate. So make sure you’re giving yourself at least two minutes to go to the bathroom.

One way is to make sure you’re sitting fully on the toilet. So for those of us ladies that go out and we get grossed out by seats, it’s not good when you squat and hover.

You need to be sitting fully on the seat.

If it is a sketchy situation, wipe it down, put toilet paper down, put a cover down, do whatever you can to sit fully, because it will affect how much you pee and it’ll affect how your bladder functions.

And then obviously, making sure you’re relaxing.

So if you’re rushing or you’re pushing to pee, not normal.

Relax and fully pee.

Say Goodbye to Urinary Incontinence

There-you-have- it, 5 Simple Ways to Overcome Urinary Incontinence.

I know that some of these things may seem simple,  but the basics work. Your body is made of primary water and if you’re not drinking enough of it, it will affect your urinary system.

The same thing goes with not exercising or moving enough. Your urinary system needs to function. If these muscles aren’t trained or stressed appropriately, they become weak or you can become constipated.

Obviously, there are other forms of treatments and tips but these are just some basic things you can do to get started making an impact on urinary incontinence.

If you want to see all the different ways that I can help, you can come to either our Cape Coral Physical Therapy Clinic or our Fort Myers Physical Therapy Clinic where we offer urinary incontinence treatment.