This is daunting, the symptoms you are experiencing affect your day-to-day life, it can be all you can think about and leave you feeling anxiety and stress.
When you are first told you have a pelvic organ prolapse, it is not something you may have ever heard of or thought about until this point. You probably don’t fully understand what it means and what you can do to help yourself.
When a woman first starts her journey with us she feels overwhelmed, upset and a little lost which we understand and we reassure them and you, it is not the end of everything, we know you can exercise again, run again and avoid surgery.
We know it is important to have all the information so you can make the best decision for you and your needs and lifestyle.
This is a very isolating diagnosis but it is much more common than you think. It’s just not something you may talk to friends or family about so the conversation isn’t flowing, we are trying to change that.
This is so common that I am going to give you a few stats
1 in 3 women suffer with stress or urge incontinence.
50% or women postmenopausal have a prolapse. (Let that one sink in a minute as that is a HUGE amount of women.)
By adding in some self-care in your 30’s and 40’s when you start to experience hormonal changes of perimenopause, you will be in a stronger position and decrease your chances of stress/urge incontinence and prolapse.
Also, it is never too late, improvements can be made at any age, we have worked with women of all ages into their seventies.
Sorry ladies, I know, sometimes being a woman really sucks!
Some of the questions we often hear at this time.
“I thought this only happened to old ladies, why is it happening to me?”
Nope, we see ladies from their early thirties upwards, it is a myth it is old ladies only, Postpartum prolapse is very common.
“Did I do something wrong?”
No, not wrong, it’s the way we are built, you have just been living life, there are points in our lives where things happen like childbirth, chest infections (coughing), lifting something heavy which can sometimes cause an immense amount of pressure on already weakened tissue that can bring the problem to light. It is the way we are made up and it is different for every woman, please do not blame yourself or beat yourself up you have done nothing wrong.
“Is surgery my only option?”
Not necessarily, there are different grades to a prolapse diagnosis but what we focus on is your symptoms and working together to improve this.
Depending on your prolapse, your symptoms and how this is affecting your quality of life sometimes surgery is a viable option. In these cases, there is still work that we can do in order to prepare you for surgery and rehab you after.
By introducing the correct core rehab methods it is possible to manage your prolapse symptoms, we have used our programme for over 9 years to make it a unique, tailor made training plan for women suffering with prolapse.
I will cover exercise and prolapse in another blog but for now I want you to think about three things that will immediately make you feel a bit better.
Pressure- we want to reduce the pressure in our abdominal cavity, it weighs down on our prolapse so avoid anything that adds pressure for now, including impact work, ab crunches, planks, in fact anything that lifts head and shoulders in a lying position and be careful what you lift. This is just until you rebuild your core, for more advice on exercising with a prolapse read our other blogs or go to our YouTube channel.
Posture- try to be more aware of your posture all the time, not just while reading this.
Breathing – a lot of us shallow breathe, or belly breathe, for the purpose of reducing pressure we want to be breathing up into our ribs just try it now.
First try and breathe into your rib cage in your normal seated or standing position, probably quite hard right?
Now sit up or stand tall and breathe into your ribs, so much easier and naturally reduces the pressure.
Give it a try and see how you get on. For more information on what we do to help women like you, get in touch.
