How I Stopped Peeing Myself While Running

Its no secret, if you follow me and have throughout my postpartum journey that I had a pretty serious issue of peeing myself when I started back up with running. Now I had a slight issue with this previous to getting pregnant and would pee when I would sneeze and often when I would run as well but it was much less severe. After having Skylar it was much much worse to the point where during the first couple of runs it was literally running down my legs…. talk about embarrassing, cold, and just not fun.

Now before I get to much further into this article I want to put a note or disclaimer out there that I am in no way a specialist in pelvic floor issues, I am not a doctor, nor am I trained in any way regarding the pelvic floor. I am merely sharing my journey, what worked for me, what was going on and what I did to help. If you are having pelvic floor issues or incontinence in anyway please consult your doctor and/or a pelvic floor specialist please do not take this directly from me. I personally went and saw a pelvic floor specialist here in Spokane. She was amazing by the way, and if you live in Spokane and need to see one I highly recommend Christy Frazier, PT, DPT (not affiliated in anyway I just loved her). She was awesome, made me feel super comfortable and explained everything very clearly.

So what is the pelvic floor?

The pelvic floor is the layer of muscles that support your pelvic organs such as the bladder, uterus (for women), bowels, and prostate (for men). It stretches from the pubic bone all the way to the coccyx or tail bone. The pelvic floor helps to support these organs, gives us control over the bladder and bowels, and are also important for sexual function in both men and women. During pregnancy these muscles help to support the baby by supporting the uterus.

This is a good little animation that shows the pelvic floor:

During pregnancy the pelvic floor stretches, and relaxes, and changes due to hormone changes and holding the weight of the baby. When you are giving birth, both vaginally and caesarean your pelvic floor muscles are impacted. During birth the muscles of your pelvic floor undergo a ton of stretching and strain in order to help guide your precious little out of the birth canal.

You can actually start doing exercises prior to giving birth to help you improve strength in your pelvic floor that will not only make recovery easier but giving birth as well. One thing that I did was this yoga that I found on you tube, now again I am not affiliated at all with this I just really liked this yoga routine and found that it really helped me both before and after birth in improving the strength in my pelvic floor so I am going to share it with you too.

Despite this yoga being incredibly helpful I still had a lot of issues with peeing myself when running especially on the treadmill. I of course instantly just assumed it was because my pelvic floor was weak due to having given a vaginal birth and did a whole bunch of work to continue to strengthen and was seeing no results. When I was finally able to get in to see the pelvic floor therapist what we actually found was two fold 1) my pelvic floor was actually to strong, it needed to relax rather than constantly stay under tension and 2) I had some adhesions and scar tissue in my pelvic specifically around my tail bone due to the act of giving birth. My birth story goes something like this…. 48 hours of intense pre-labor in which I experience very continual and active back contractions, 12 hours of active labor using an epidural in which we then administered PIT in order to speed the process up and I contracted most likely every 30 seconds or so for about 8 hours or more during this entire time little Skye Man was slamming up against my tail bone as my pelvis never really tilted forwards and I had horrible back labor. So during the process of actual labor I basically destroyed my tail bone and combine that with the two episiotomies I had some scar tissue to deal with.

First we had to get me to get my pelvic floor to relax. This came mostly from breathing exercises and focusing on relaxing my pelvic floor. To do this I would breath in through my belly, dropping my diaphragm, and basically pushing down on my pelvic floor as though I was going to force myself to pee. My pelvic floor therapist called it bearing down, if you were sitting on a chair you should feel your sit bones melt into the chair.

After working on getting my pelvic floor to relax for a bit we then started to work on timing and endurance of my pelvic floor. Because I had spent so much time with my pelvic floor engaged it was overly fatigued and couldn’t hold itself for long periods of time when I asked it to.

This is where kegels came into play, once again I used breath work to help focus on this. Whenever I was driving or feeding Skylar I would focus on disengaging and then re-engaging my pelvic floor. So breath in with your belly, dropping your diaphragm and pushing your pelvic floor into the chair your are sitting on (relaxing it) then as you breath in drawing all sides of your pelvic floor in together. It was described to me like the idea of a napkin falling into a bowl when the napkin as that the top of the bowl it is all open and when it falls into the bowl the sides all come together. At first I would just do a few of these until I really felt I could feel the changes of engaging and re-engaging. Then I would start doing some holds; release for 10 seconds hold for 10 seconds and do sets of these for around five minutes at time just randomly. The next step was to start adding in some strength and endurance by doing almost like bursts (or strides if you were comparing it to running hahah) where I would relax and the would quickly engage and disengage 5-10 times really really fast then relax and repeat.

Once I had some of the timing down we next implemented it with more timing and strengthening by adding it into my exercises…. so whenever I was on the bike I would focus on engaging during my harder intervals and then during my recovery intervals I would focus on relaxing by bearing down and feeling like my sit bones were melting into my seat. I would then add them to my squats, at the top of the squat I would breath in and bear down on my pelvic floor relaxing it and then as I went down I would breath in and focus on engaging my pelvic floor thinking about a napkin falling into a bowel drawing in all sides of my pelvic floor.

I will be honest it was really hard for me to feel the engagement of these muscles at first. As someone who is very visual and the muscles very specific it was really hard to feel it. I was often trying to hard to engage these muscles feeling as though it needed to be a big movement that I should feel, however when it comes to exercising your pelvic floor it doesn’t need to be big. In fact its a small movement that you may barely feel and that is ok!!

The concept of figuring out which muscles to engage and how to visualize this so that you can feel it is a little tough, here are a few little tips from http://www.pelvicfloorfirst.org.au/ that I found that really helped me to be able to visualize the engagement of the muscles.

  • Relax the muscles of your thighs, bottom and abdomen (tummy).

  • Squeeze in the muscles around the front passage as if trying to stop the flow of urine.

  • Squeeze in the muscles around the vagina and suck upwards inside the pelvic.

  • Squeeze in the muscles around the back passage as if trying to stop passing wind.

  • The muscles around the front and back passages should squeeze up and inside the pelvis.

  • Women who are familiar with using tampons can imagine squeezing in the vagina as if squeezing a tampon up higher in the vagina.

  • Identify the muscles that contract when you do all these things together. Then relax and loosen them.

Lastly, it just took some patience. I had to be patient with it and give it time. I had to back off my running for a little bit and focus on building up slowly. I also found that really focusing on strength vs. actually running made a difference. Focusing on the little stabilizing muscles combined with compound exercises such as squats, hex bar squats, and leg press allowed me to build up the strength needed. I would do some form of glute activation work using “booty resistance bands” or “mini bands” three to four days a week and then added in the compound power leg work two days a week focusing on building the strength from the whole system both inside and out.

I hope this helps guide you a little bit on your journey. Remember, you may have to be more patient than you want to be when it comes to the pelvic floor and that is ok!!! It doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you and if you are willing to be patient you will come back stronger for it!!!

CHEERS!!
Kayla

Resources used to create this article:
1. https://www.health.qld.gov.au/news-events/news/pelvic-floor-pre-during-pregnancy-birth-exercises-physiotherapist

2. https://www.continence.org.au/pages/how-do-pelvic-floor-muscles-help.html

Another Resource that I highly recommend taking a look at when it comes to learning more about strengthening your pelvic floor is Bump Runner. Christine Nichols is a Certified Pre- and Postnatal Fitness specialist as well as a run coach and she has some amazing programs to help guide you (with the help of your doctor if needed) for helping you both pre and post pregnancy to help keep you running!!! (not affiliated just think her content is amazing).

postpartum, postpartum journey, pregnancy, triathlon, pelvic floor, workout, triathlete, run, runner, runner girl, runners, runningKayla Bowkerwhereyourfeettakeyou, #whereyourfeet, pelvic floor, pregnancy, postpartum, postpartum journey, running, runner, run, triathlon, triathlete