Incontinence: Timing and Volume Make All the Difference

A couple of weeks ago, I shared a portion of the interview I had with Physical Therapist LIzanne Pastore about incontinence, especially as it applied to older people. Her statistics were amazing, the costs are billions of dollars in the United States alone.

Lizanne also explained the hydraulics of incontinence. How the muscles and nerves in your pelvic floor need to work together to provide you the relief you need from either urinating too often or leaking, and how confused pelvic floor muscles can be a big part of the problem.

I was surprised by her definition of “normal continence.”

Lizanne said most people urinate once every 3 -4 hours, about 5 - 7 times a day. How often and how much does depend on what you are eating and drinking. If you are eating foods that are known bladder irritants, you'll urinate more often.

She said most people’s bladders hold about 16 - 20 ounces of fluid, and you first feel the need to void when your bladder is about half full. However, most people resist that first feeling and wait until their bladder is much fuller.

When your bladder is filling and storing fluid, your bladder muscles need to be relaxed to allow for expansion. Then they contract when urinating.

Your pelvic floor muscles relax and contract opposite of your bladder muscles. During the day, they need to be contracted, holding the urine in the bladder. During urination, they must totally relax to allow the flow.

Most people who have difficulty with incontinence have pelvic floor muscles that are confused. They are typically unaware of how tight they are holding their pelvic floor muscles during the day, and find, like tightly held shoulders that so many of us experience while working, they don’t let go when we need them to.

Most people don’t consciously think about how they are using their pelvic floor muscles when they are urinating, or making love. We just expect them to do their job without a whole lot of interference or even support from us.

Yet their ability  to contract and relax when appropriate is crucial.

Confused muscles just mean more and more intractable incontinence.  And more difficulty with sexual arousal and love making.

Lizanne went on to talk about the different types of incontinence, urge incontinence and stress incontinence and how they need very different treatments.

Unwittingly, many of us are our own worse enemies when it comes to do it for ourselves treatments for incontinence. Not understanding there are two kinds of incontinence and what they are means we can make things worse for ourselves not better.

One of the most common ways to increase problems with incontinence is by using the wrong kind of exercises.

You guessed it the Kegels that are so often touted on the internet and by many physicians as the best thing you can do for increasing your sexual prowess and pleasure can actually be the cause of your increasing problems with incontinence. Especially when you don’t know what kind of incontinence issues you are dealing with.

So don’t do your self in. Get the information you need about incontinence and senior sex from my interview with Lizanne Pastore, available at SatisfyingSeniorSex.com/interviews.

You can hear the other excerpts from the interview and order a copy of the full interview for your home library.