What hypopressives have taught me

My journey with hypopressives was pretty much love at first sight. I had been struggling with my own pelvic floor issues ever since the birth of my first baby. Looking back now, it all seems very obvious to me about what was really going on, but at the time it didn’t make sense to me. Maybe it was denial, the thought of a prolapse was easier to reject, I guess.

After the birth of my second baby things got a hundred times worse and the symptoms never went away. I tried many things and saw many professionals, did all the work and so much research. But somehow I didn’t come across hypopressives until I was almost 1 year postpartum.

I started the Create Lift Programme with Alice and experienced instant improvements and since then there was no turning back. And I’ve learned so much on the way!

I discovered that I had a lot more tension in my body than I thought and it blew my mind. I wasn’t aware of it all - and I’m a physiotherapist! As I started to practice the rib stretch and some of the more advanced poses, I realised that the whole of my right side was totally “stuck”. The amount of tension was so intense, that I had to limit the level of my rib-stretch in certain poses, as they slowly helped me to release the tightnesses.

Hypopressives have also shown me over and over again, that many pelvic floor issues aren’t caused by weakness at all. I’ve always been very active and enjoyed being strong, so being told over and over that my pelvic floor was weak, even though I’d been practicing my pelvic floor exercises according to the NICE guidelines for years, made me always feel uncomfortable (I’ve always hated to be weak, even more to be called weak!). As I’ve been coaching others through the programme and seeing how women re-connect with their whole core and breathing system with this technique, release tension and create lift in the pelvic floor, it’s made me more confident in the knowledge that increasing the contractile strength of the pelvic floor muscles is often not enough.

It’s also a very subtle technique, and very often less is more. When I was first learning the technique, my instant progress started to fizzle out after about a month and a half. That made me try harder. Turned out I was trying too hard and had, somewhere along the way, slightly changed my technique - it caused my improvement rate to slow and pretty much come to a halt. And this is what we find with a lot of women who either don’t get any results or who start to loose the benefits they once got from the technique. Perhaps we’re so used to working hard and feeling sore afterwards, that we can’t believe something easy and enjoyable can be so effective.

Lastly, I thought I knew a lot about breathing already, but as I first started to practice hypopressives and then coach other women, my understanding of breathing has deepened. It’s about so much more than just brining air into our lungs and meditation. It’s a superpower that has the potential of unlocking solutions to many pelvic floor issues.