You Can Retrain Your Bladder

Retraining your bladder takes work and commitment!

Unfortunately, people like you and I have confused central nervous system (CNS. Our CNS signals the brain when we have to urinate and our is stuck on GO! To get it unstuck you need to retrain the bladder! It can feel like tug of war at times but if your consisting you will win the frequency war!

Depending upon the type and seriousness of your problem, one or more may be right for you. But many doctors recommend trying bladder control training, which means learning to urinate on a schedule, strengthening the pelvic muscles (Kegel exercises), and sometimes biofeedback. Bladder control training can be especially helpful with urge incontinence — the sudden and overwhelming need to urinate, sometimes accompanied by involuntary loss of urine on the way to the bathroom.

These exercises are good for everyone. You don't have to have frequency, urgency or even leakage to do these exercises. Kegels are use d as preventive measures as well.
Don't be afraid to teach your children these exercises (boys too)! We are all susceptible to pelvic syndromes.

You CAN retrain your bladder

There are many approaches to treating urinary incontinence. Depending upon the type and seriousness of your problem, one or more may be right for you. But many doctors recommend trying bladder control training, which means learning to urinate on a schedule, strengthening the pelvic muscles (Kegel exercises), and sometimes biofeedback. Bladder control training can be especially helpful with urge incontinence — the sudden and overwhelming need to urinate, sometimes accompanied by involuntary loss of urine on the way to the bathroom.

Learn to “go” on schedule

The mainstay of bladder control training is timed voiding, which means that you urinate at a set time, not when your bladder tells you to. Here’s what to do:

• Determine your pattern. For a day or two, keep track of what times during the day you urinate or leak urine.
• Choose an interval. Figure out how long you typically wait between urinations during the day. Choose a starting time that’s 15 minutes longer. For example, if you usually go every hour, your starting interval will be 1 hour, 15 minutes.
• Go by the clock. On the day you start, empty your bladder first thing in the morning and not again until after the interval you’ve set. If that time arrives before you feel the urge, go anyway. Remember, you’re training your bladder to keep a schedule. If the urge hits first, do everything you can to hold off going. This can be difficult at first, but usually improves with practice. If the urge is great, try to distract yourself. Practice Kegels (described below), cross your legs, stand still, or breathe slowly in and out for counts of four. Remind yourself that your bladder isn’t really full. If you can’t wait the full 15 minutes, try to manage another 5 minutes before walking slowly to the bathroom.
• Increase your interval. Once you’re comfortable with your initial interval and aren’t having any leakage — this may take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks — increase the time by another 15 minutes. Repeat this process, increasing your time by 15-minute increments. After several weeks or months, you may find that you’re able to wait for 3–4 hours between trips to the bathroom and that the feelings of urgency and episodes of incontinence have greatly diminished.
• Don’t train at night. Get up in the night whenever you need to urinate. Your day training should eventually begin to influence your entire voiding pattern, so that you get up less frequently at night.

Learn how to do Kegels

Pelvic floor muscles are the muscles you use to hold back urination and thus are important to urinary continence. You can strengthen and condition these muscles with pelvic floor exercises, also known as Kegels (named for Arnold Kegel, the physician who first described them).

To perform Kegels, you first need to find your pelvic floor muscles. Pretend you’re trying to avoid passing gas. You should feel the contraction more in the back than the front. Don’t contract the muscles of your stomach, leg, or buttocks. Once you’ve located the pelvic floor muscles, you need to repeatedly contract and relax them. Practice both short and long contractions and releases.

Short contractions are quick squeezes and releases. Mastering long contractions will take more practice. Start by holding each contraction for 3–5 seconds, resting for the same number of seconds between contractions. Build up to 10-second contractions with 10 seconds of rest between contractions. Try to do 30–40 long Kegels every day, divided into groups of 10 contractions each. You may want to do 10 before getting out of bed in the morning, 10 standing after lunch, 10 in the evening while sitting, and another 10 before going to sleep.

Some individuals may benefit from biofeedback using a device that can help monitor progress in learning and doing Kegels. Patches placed over the muscles are connected to a video