Bladder training can help control and minimize urinary incontinence caused by stress or urgency. It involves retraining the bladder to hold urine for longer periods of time and reducing feelings of urgency. It can take anywhere from four to twenty weeks and it’s important to consult a healthcare professional throughout the process.
Bladder training is a series of techniques used to help control and minimize the impact of urinary incontinence. While bladder training doesn’t necessarily work for all types of urinary incontinence, it can have a large effect on many types, especially those caused by stress or urgency. Bladder training techniques have improved dramatically in recent years, and there are now a number of excellent resources.
Urinary incontinence is an umbrella term used to describe any involuntary loss of urine and can be caused by any number of things. These could include medical conditions, stress, excessive bladder or bedwetting. Some people experience urinary incontinence only when their body is subjected to certain physical stresses, such as laughing or sneezing, while others can experience it at any time, sometimes with no apparent common thread.
The concept behind bladder training is quite simple: You retrain your bladder program so that your bladder is able to hold urine for longer periods of time and reduce feelings of urgency. This is done over a few months and it is important to remain patient throughout the retraining, sticking to the regimen long enough for results to show. It’s a good idea to keep a journal during the bladder training process as well, to see progress and have a starting point to talk to a healthcare professional about the procedure.
To start bladder training, every day when you wake up you will want to empty your bladder completely. Take your time to empty your bladder as much as possible, as overflow can often occur when your bladder is simply not emptied completely. You will then wait a set time, which you can determine yourself or achieve with consultation with a healthcare professional, until you empty your bladder again. For starters, this can be a short amount of time, like fifteen or twenty minutes. When you go to the bathroom at these scheduled times, make sure you empty your bladder completely again, even if you don’t feel like you need to urinate.
If during the day you feel the urge to urinate at a time not dictated by your bladder training schedule, use breathing techniques and Kegel exercises to relax your body and hold the urine until the urge passes . If the urge doesn’t go away, hold it as long as you can, then go to the bathroom, relax, and get right back to your schedule. Once you are able to easily wait the set interval between visits to the restroom, you can extend the interval by another fifteen to twenty minutes.
Continue this bladder training regimen until a comfortable time between pulses is achieved. Typically, this can take anywhere from four to twenty weeks. Keeping to a schedule, you can also do muscle exercises like Kegel exercises to strengthen your ability to hold back impulses. It’s also important to consult a healthcare professional throughout the process, to make sure your urinary incontinence isn’t caused by a more serious underlying medical condition.
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