Bladder Boot Camp: Taming Urgency and Teaching Your Bladder Discipline
Your go-to guide for turning bladder woes into wins! Packed with zesty tips, exercises, and savvy tweaks, this guide is all about gaining the upper hand over those pesky pee urges.
“Everyone go pee before you get in the car, even if you don't need to!” As kids ourselves or as parents of little ones, we've all heard or imparted this golden nugget of advice. After all, no self-respecting adult wants to make an unscheduled pit stop at a random gas station.
Random stops can be a treacherous journey. First, you must navigate the tantalizing labyrinth of candies you don't actually want, but they are right there, and wouldn’t it be nice to have a peanut butter cup? Then, you enter the bathroom lottery, where the last cleaning session could have been today, last week, or Saturday, 17 June 1957.
If you've ever embarked on a road trip through the southern United States, you'll understand the allure of the legendary 'Buck-ees' gas station – where bathrooms gleam with pristine glory, and you can score gas station food that won’t live on your hips for a week or make your digestive track hate life.
However, let's face it. Not everyone has experienced the divine cleanliness of Buck-ees, and bathroom breaks on a road trip typically feel like they should involve an industrial-sized hand sanitizer.
This aversion to rest stops raises a universal question we've all pondered: 'Can I hold it?' As adults, we should be capable of holding our pee call for a decent 2-4 hours unless we have a problem called urinary urgency.
Solving the 'Urine'escapable Urgency
Triggers
Urinary urgency is when your bladder suddenly cranks up the pressure, making it a struggle to keep your pee where it belongs. What's intriguing is that this can happen even when your bladder isn't full. Sometimes, it's the mischievous work of a urinary tract infection (UTI), and it's always a good idea to consult your healthcare provider to rule out any medical shenanigans if this is an all of a sudden problem.
Urinary urgency is often influenced by a few other sneaky culprits, such as fizzy drinks, caffeine, citrus juices, alcohol, and spicy foods. These drinks and food can be the mischievous villains that provoke your bladder to act like it can’t wait.
You don’t need to give up all the things you love but try and see if you cut back on fizzy drinks if your trips to the bathroom are less frequent. You don’t need to cut out caffeine but try to see if you stop drinking caffeine after noon if your symptoms are less in the evenings.
DO NOT give up everything. Instead, try decreasing the amount of one thing and writing down the times of your bathroom visits, then go back to normal the next day and write down the time of your bathroom visits. Is there a pattern? This can help you determine if those foods or drinks are part of what have you running to the bathroom more than you want throughout the day.
However, if you're not experiencing any other medical symptoms and don’t drink eight coffees a day, those too-frequent bathroom breaks can be solved with pelvic floor strengthening. It is one of the secret weapons to destroy those extra trips to the bathroom💪.
Whipping Your Bladder Into Shape: Boot Camp for the Urine-Minded
I swear that will be the last pee humor paragraph title….probably.
So, how do you become a bladder whisperer, taming it like a pro? Well, it's time to talk about urge suppression techniques via some help from your pelvic floor. Your bladder is a muscle, but it is a smooth muscle, meaning that you can’t tell it when to contract and send the signal that it is time to empty your bladder contents. BUT you do have the power to retrain those smooth muscles, resisting the urge to pee and decreasing the frequency of the urge to pee.
Overactive bladder syndrome, a fancy term for urinary urgency, is due to involuntary contractions of the bladder's smooth muscle (detrusor) during the storage of urine. Research shows that exercise training of the pelvic floor muscles can steadily decrease the frequency of those contractions.
Here are the 3 key tips to assist in retraining that bladder to behave and not rule your free time.
When you get a signal that you have to go to the bathroom, and it has been less than 2 hours since your last trip, inhale the Kegel as you exhale. Attempt to hold that Kegel for 10 seconds.
Wait for 15 minutes if you can after getting the signal to go to the bathroom. Set a timer and try to do a few more Kegels. If you need to go to the bathroom before the end of the 15 minutes, don’t beat yourself up about it. This is training, not graduation.
Do Kegels a few times a day, during your in-between time, like while waiting in line at the grocery store or while loading the dishwasher, with the goal of holding the contraction for 10 seconds. Try not to squeeze your butt muscles while you do it. Check out this video on how to get a good pelvic floor contraction (Kegel).
Starting Small on the Path to Bladder Control
Often, when we embark on a mission to improve ourselves, like to start strengthening our pelvic floor finally, we feel like we have only two options: either commit every waking moment to pelvic floor exercises or resign ourselves to a life where we stock up on adult diapers just in case you sneeze too hard and your bladder fully empties.
When we start something new, we tend to leave no room for mistakes or slip-ups. We forget that life is full of unexpected surprises that hijack our brain space, making us forget our well-intentioned plans. There is no perfect time to start. It's about understanding that life can get messy, but dedicating just five minutes in your In-between time lets you kickstart your journey. No waiting period is required. Begin right where you are because the best is yet to come.
D.I.G. Deep
Get Deliberate
Find one of the notebooks you have lying around and start keeping a bladder journal, or write it down on your phone. The goal is for you to track so that you can steadily see the small changes that happen. Don’t worry about it on the weekends, but try to track how long you can go between bathroom trips during the week. If you go longer than 3-4 hours, you aren’t drinking enough.
Get Inspired
What will you be able to do when your bladder urges aren’t dictating your schedule? Will you go out to coffee with friends without sitting right by the bathroom? This is the reason why you are taking those 5 minutes back a day. It is important to picture that future you and write down what you will be able to do in 2 months compared to now.
Get Going
Share this article with a friend and ask if they will be your Kegel accountability partner. Text each other each night and encourage each other to keep finding those 5 minutes to do the Kegels each day. Want a good way to understand if you are doing those Kegels correctly? 👀Watch this⬅️⬅️