|
I sometimes
feel like the little boy in the story of The Empereror’s New Clothes. You know the one where everybody believes the
Emperor is wearing a beautiful suit of clothes because everyone says he is? One little boy saw things as there were and
shouted “The Emperor is naked!” Of
course he was told not to be so stupid; after all couldn’t he see what everyone
else could see? After all if so many people were in agreement they must be
right, mustn’t they?
Why does
nobody question the piece of folklore that says squeeze and hold your pelvic
floor muscles against nothing and you’ll strengthen your pelvic floor?
The simple
fact is that, for the vast majority of women, pelvic floor exercises performed,
according to the conventional wisdom, do not work for two reasons:
You MUST
isolate the correct muscle for success with pelvic floor exercises (an
estimated 40% of women do not even use the correct muscle!)
You MUST
work the muscle against resistance.
It’s pure
logic when you think about it – If you had an injury to your arm and needed to
rehabilitate the muscle in your arm you would not succeed in doing that by
merely flexing your arm up and down, you would work the muscle against
resistance.
A muscle
will gain in strength according to the demand placed on it. If you place no demand on the muscle you are
trying to rehabilitate you will get very little return on your efforts.
I can say,
with confidence, that encouraging women to perform pelvic floor exercises as
they are normally taught is likely to frustrate them and not give them the
results they desire. Over the past
couple of years I’ve spoken to probably well over 1,000 women and spoken to
many women’s groups, given talks at various health shows on this issue and in
all that time I’ve met only one woman who has managed to stop stress
incontinence by performing pelvic floor exercises as they are normally taught.
There is
something wrong with this picture. Now
there’s no point in blaming your medical professionals for not giving you this
information. Although it must be said
that there is no excuse for any of them who choose to remain ignorant of the
fact once they do have it! The fact is
they are not taught at medical school about the need for resistance for success
with pelvic floor exercises. The
knowledge of how effective pelvic floor exercise could eliminate the need for
most of the surgeries carried out today for correcting stress incontinence and
prolapse has been lost over the past few decades in a morass of ignorance and mis-information.
Too many people blithely accept the
conventional wisdom on this subject and don’t see that it is merely ensuring a
plentiful supply of future customers for the vast incontinence and prolapse
industries.
Women
deserve to know the truth about effective pelvic floor exercise. What is the truth? As I’ve already said there are two components
of effective pelvic floor exercise, isolating the correct muscle and working
the muscle against resistance. It really
is that simple.
Dr Kegel
was an American gynaecologist and one-time Health Commissioner of Chicago.
He was concerned as far back as the 1940’s about the amounts of pelvic
surgery being carried out on women for no other reason than their pelvic floor
muscles were too weak to do their job properly.
He started
working with women at his clinic in Los Angeles with resistance exercise, isolating
the pelvic floor muscle and working the muscle against resistance. This method, in stark contrast to the squeeze
against nothing advice we’re given today was so successful that in 1950 he
announced that no more routine surgery for stress incontinence would be
performed at his hospital.
He had
great success with women who were suffering from prolapse and in one paper indicated
that through resistance exercise it was possible to reverse a prolapse by as
much as 5 to 7 cm!
After some
time he also had many women returning to tell him how their sex lives had
greatly improved as a result of their exercise regime. He then spent many years investigating the
link between the strength of the pelvic floor muscle and its effect on normal
sexual functioning. Quite brave for
someone in 1950’s America!
In 1952 he was quoted as
saying "Observations in [more than 3,000 women,] both parous and
nulliparous..., ranging in age from 16 to 74 years, have led to the conclusion
that sexual feeling within the vagina is closely related to muscle tone, and
can be improved through muscle education and resistive exercise." He also
reported that 78 of 123 women complaining explicitly of sexual deficits had
achieved orgasm following the training.
The Kegelmaster is the most effective way to achieve success with pelvic
floor exercises today as it takes Dr Kegel’s work to a new level of accessibility
for every woman.
|
