What are hypopressives and how can can they help my pelvic floor?

Hypopressives have been helping countless of women stop their accidental leakages or prolapse symptoms in all stages of life. Yes, you might not have heard about them before, but if the reason you're here is because you are struggling to find help to your pelvic floor symptoms, you’ll be happy you’re hearing about them now!

Hypopressives are used in many other countries such as France, US and Canada as the go-to postnatal exercise method and more and more in the UK too. There is good evidence about how hypopressive exercise helps to reduce incontinence and prolapse symptoms and improve quality of life - there is some new exciting evidence on it’s way too!

You could compare hypopressive exerice with yoga or pilates - you go through a set of various poses and breathing plays an important role. But hypopressives have some important differences which make it so effective in pelvic floor rehab.

So before we’ll have a look at how hypopressives work it’s important to understand what breathing has to do with the pelvic floor. To put it shortly, our “breathing muscle”, the diaphragm, is closely linked with the pelvic floor and they work together as you inhale and exhale. When we’re breathing in the diaphragm moves down helping to draw air in to the lungs and the pelvic floor moves down and relaxes at the same time. And when we’re breathing out the lungs empty, diaphragm lifts upwards and so does the pelvic floor. This is why the importance of a good breathing technique is essential when we’re working with pelvic floor challenges or in the postnatal period in general. 

In hypopressive exercise we use 360-breathing to help activate the above diaphragm-pelvic floor-connection but what hypopressives are especially known for is its apnea breath. It’s where a vacuum is created in the abdominal cavity by consciously stretching the ribcage without inhaling and whilst holding your breath. A lift is creates that’s felt all the way down in the pelvic floor as the pelvic organs are lifted upwards decongesting the pelvic floor.

The vacuum and lift create an unconscious or automatic contraction of the pelvic floor muscles and your deep core muscles, strengthening these structures. It’s great for improving the ability of these muscles to work automatically in synergy with each other and many women report experiencing considerable improvements of their incontinence after just few weeks of practising hypopressives.

Hypopressives are effective in reducing tensions in the pelvic floor area through myofascial release and because very often when we’re experiencing pelvic floors symptoms we end up overly tensing the our floors as a response to heaviness or in fear of loosing bladder control. And hence the pelvic floor muscles can become over-active and actually never fully relax. A tight muscle is a weak muscle, as it’s less able to produce a good quality muscle contraction. And keeping your pelvic floor muscles tight all the time is counter-productive and will only cause the muscles to fatigue and not function properly, which often increases the symptoms even further.

So you are improving the function of your pelvic floor by working on relaxations and breathing whilst forgetting all about you pelvic floor for a minute. It’s effective and comfortable.

And once you are settled in your practise it only takes 10 minutes a day to keep your symptoms a bay. Plus there are so many other benefits to hypopressive exercise! Head over to my Instagram account to learn more.

I hope you have found this helpful, if you have any questions do send me a message, I love answering any questions you might have. And if you want to start your journey towards a worry-free life with your pelvic floor - email me and we’ll book a free 20 minute phone call to talk about what you are going through so I can best support you on your way.

Annika x