Some love the gym, others love yoga

Hypopressive exercise and pelvic floor exercises are often put one against the other on the opposite sides, it’s either or. But it’s a starting point where you are forced to choose one over the other, and it doesn’t necessarily lead anywhere useful.

Based on the current evidence we have at hand, both methods of exercise work and help women reduce unwanted pelvic floor symptoms.

I believe that the more tools we have in our tool boxes the better. Especially as no one single tool is a guaranteed 100% fix, it’s likely we need a combination of approaches. And when we are talking about women’s health and the pelvic floor rehab, these methods and approaches can be numerous. From PF-exericses and physiotherapy, pessaries, medications (for types of incontinence), talking therapies and support for mental health, hypopressives to surgery and so on. Information and education are hugely important and should always be part of whatever the approach is.

We all share a similar body but I have yet never met the perfect average. With this I mean that we all have our own variations in our anatomies, different histories of injuries accumulated over the years and how we’ve healed and how we’ve adjusted to them. We do different things for hobbies and over all we move our bodies differently which also affects the composition of our bodies. We have different births and all babies and their anatomies are different as well. So when we look at recovery we should be expecting to see variations too. Different people might need to concentrate on slightly different factors in their rehab even if they look the same on paper.

Also, when we look at how effective an intervention is, we need to look at how easy it is for people to do, or to have access to, as well as possible risks. Of course surgery comes with it’s risks and they might only have a certain lifespan before another operation is necessary, so often all other suitable noninvasive routes to recovery should be tried and at least considered. Now, exercise is a fairly low level risk intervention and will have a lasting difference if the exercise is kept up.

There are many people who find doing pelvic floor exercises easy and happily integrate it into their day. And there are more and more fun gadgets to help and motivate you to do your pelvic floor exercises! Some people love going to the gym and working on one muscle group at a time and it is something they are very used to doing. I’d argue these people probably find pelvic floor exercise easy too. Others might be more like yogis or skiers for whom it’s all about the activity and less about the exercise. Maybe these are the people who find it difficult to commit to pf-exercises for.

So we need more tools - and we have them! We know that hypopressives give the same level of results to women, in fact one study found that if you combined hypopressives and pfe’s the results were even better, and this is good news for anyone who hasn’t found total help with one.

If you enjoy what you are doing, you are more likely to keep at it. Hypopressives have so many great benefits other than the obvious reduction in pelvic floor symptoms like incontinence or prolapse. You can improve and challenge yourself for years to come if you wanted to, you can be creative and vary your flows every day. And it only takes you 10 minutes a day.