I recently sat down for an interview with Lori Phillips from the Be Awesome Network.
In this video, I opened up about my personal struggles with pelvic floor issues and how they led me to discover a powerful, holistic approach to women’s health. This is a must-watch for anyone looking to take control of their body and well-being.
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I’ve included the transcript of this video below. You can also listen to or download the MP3 audio version of this video by clicking HERE.
Transcript
Lori Phillips:
Okay, well, welcome everyone to the Be Awesome Network. I have Nikki Scott with me today. I’m so excited for this conversation because we’re going to be talking about women’s health and the issues that surround that. But Nikki, why don’t we start by you telling everyone where in the world are you and what have you been up to lately?
Nikki Scott:
I am in the UK, and I have been getting my courses ready because I’ve been doing a big revamp of everything. So yeah, I’ve just been busy with my work really. Yeah, not too many holidays, hoping to have a holiday a bit later on. But yeah, mostly just my work.
Lori Phillips:
Well, you’re very passionate about women’s health and changing it where you live and really all over the world. But why don’t you kind of tell us, how did you get to a place where you’re passionate about it? Why are you so passionate about women’s health?
Nikki Scott:
Well, I suppose it wasn’t really until I had children myself because I didn’t really have any issues with pelvic floor or incontinence—getting straight into the incontinence straight away. I suppose that, you know, I was having this conversation actually yesterday with someone I was doing a podcast with, and she was quite young, and she was just saying that she didn’t know about all these things. And I said I felt exactly the same until I had my children. I wasn’t really aware of women’s health issues, and the current treatment that I—the treatment that I was given—my kids are—well, I had twins, and they’re 24 this year. So, when I talk to my mum, the treatment is kind of the same that’s being given to women. So, you know, it’s fairly outdated the treatment that women are receiving when they have issues. But I didn’t really know any of that until I had my kids. And so I was 32, I was classed as a geriatric mother, which I found quite sad. And I think these days, like now, it’s not—you can be a bit older without being classed as geriatric. But 32, you know, that’s actually quite young, I think. Anyway, I had twins, and after I had my twins, I was kind of left feeling very unstable, like my body didn’t belong to me, and with incontinence issues. So, I had stress incontinence and urge incontinence. And up until having children, I’d been really fit and healthy and active, loved going to the gym, you know, loved all that stuff. And it led me to train and become a personal trainer, but you know, my body just didn’t feel like my own. It was really a really odd feeling that I just kind of expected that I’d start to heal and things would be better, and it just wasn’t. And although I managed to kind of get the same size clothes on that I was wearing before, my body didn’t look anything like it looked before. And I don’t know really what my expectation was, but I suppose because we don’t have that education piece about the changes, about how long it takes to heal, about the things we can do to speed that up, about, you know, just having an awareness of what might happen to our body when we have children—I didn’t really have a clue. And I found it quite shocking that within my own training as a personal trainer and having done pre and postnatal training, that I couldn’t help myself.
I went through the system with the medical profession. I went to my GP. I was referred to a women’s health physiotherapist, but I actually found over time that things got worse for me, and no one could explain why. No one could kind of say, you know, “There are other treatments available,” or “There are other things available that you can do.” All of the messaging that I was getting was like, “You’ve had a baby, you’ve had twins, what do you expect? You’re a geriatric mother. What do you expect? Come back when it’s worse.” And I just couldn’t believe that I could be told that, that you know, “Come back when it’s worse,” and then what they offer you when it’s worse is surgery. And we don’t want to go down that route because often, with surgery, it’s not the answer at all. Often, it can leave a woman in a worse situation. So, you know, I did a bit of research realised that surgery just wasn’t going to be an option and that I wanted something a bit more holistic. And that kind of led me to do lots of research and to find something, which I don’t know whether you’ve heard about actually, which is called hypopressives.
Lori Phillips:
I haven’t heard of that, no.
Nikki Scott:
No, so most people that I speak to about it, even this many years on from finding it, because it was about 12 years ago—it’s a method that was being talked about a lot in Spain because that’s where it originated from. And they were using it as a tool to speed up postnatal healing and to help with the symptoms that a lot of women have after they’ve had children. It was very much seen as this kind of postnatal rehab. So, I did a bit more research started following somebody who was using it a lot with her clients, and she actually came to the UK with a course. So, she ran a training course, and you know, predominantly my clients, being a PT, were women, and women that had newly had children. And so, I just thought to myself, “Well, I need to learn it for me. I need to fix myself, and I need to get this knowledge for my clients.” So, I went on the course, and within three months, I had no incontinence. I was still kind of learning it, really. I was still getting to grips with it, but it was just pretty amazing.
And fast forward now, I’ve been through the menopause. I’m still getting quite a lot of symptoms of the menopause, but those symptoms aren’t incontinence, which tends to be one that rears its head for women going through the menopause. So, I feel like I’ve kind of put myself in the best position I can be in, going into my 60s, my 70s, my 80s. I don’t want to be an old lady wearing pull-up pants. I don’t want to be in a nursing home being looked after because I can’t look after myself because of incontinence. So, finding something that was holistic, that was really mindful, that not only helped physically but mentally as well, was a really amazing thing for me.
So that led me on, basically, to form UK Hypopressives with my partner Richard. So, now we run all the training and the education through the UK and the world because we have an online portal as well. So, not only do we reach out to women in the general public, but we’re also reaching out to people that are in the health and fitness world to do the training so that they can bring that missing piece to their clients’ rehab as well. So, yeah, I think it’s become a massive passion because it—I mean, I know it sounds corny—but it changed my life. It not only changed me physically, but it changed where I was going with my business as well because now, pretty much, I’d say 99% of what I do is helping women with rehab. And that’s not just… I tend to—most of my clients tend to be my age or maybe a little bit younger, going through that perimenopausal, menopausal stage. And they’re starting to get these awful symptoms of pelvic floor dysfunction that they don’t have any knowledge of how to deal with holistically.
Anyway, so those are the types of people I see. I do have a few postnatal clients, but I tend to find postnatal women will only really reach out for help if they’ve had a disastrous birth or they’ve had some trauma and they need help straight away. So, yeah, I mean, I suppose for me, it’s about taking something that is so stuck in the Dark Ages here in the UK with treatment. We literally treat the pelvic floor with one treatment, which is to squeeze it—to do Kegels. And it’s like, everything’s kind of—within the medical profession and generally in the world—has moved on, and it just seems like this treatment is really outdated and not great for a lot of people. It’s not the gold standard. It shouldn’t be the gold standard. There are many other treatments.
You know, I’ve learned a lot about pelvic floor rehab, and it’s about having a multifaceted approach. So, you know, I love hypopressives because it’s brilliant and it works for most people, but there may be some people that have to try other things alongside it as well. So, you know, it’s about having that open mind and not just giving women one thing, making them feel like they’re failures because it doesn’t work particularly well for them. Feeling like they can’t do it or they’re not doing it properly, and that’s why it’s not working for them. Because I certainly felt that myself. And, you know, some of the things that women go through with pelvic floor dysfunction are just not very nice for them. It doesn’t give them confidence. It doesn’t make them feel great about their body and themselves. And, you know, it can ruin relationships. So, it’s something that really needs to be talked about, and those conversations need to be changed. It’s about empowering women to say, “This isn’t good enough.” You know, this doesn’t work. You shouldn’t be telling me just to do this. You should be offering me other things, or you should be able to signpost me to someone or people that can help me.
Lori Phillips:
Yeah, I love that. Well, because it’s a fairly new topic for—let’s just say—my daughters are in their 20s, and this is not something that I’ve had a conversation with them about because it’s something I’m just now learning about. So, can you tell everyone what is the pelvic floor, and what is incontinence, and what are these issues that women are facing?
Nikki Scott:
Sure. So, the pelvic floor is like a support system, and it has deep connections. Its best friend is the diaphragm, which we know is our big breathing muscle. And so, there’s lots of—throughout yoga, Pilates, lots of different breathing techniques utilise the diaphragm. But when we do hypopressives, we’re not only utilising the diaphragm slightly differently, because we’re actually getting more lateral breath. So, we get lateral expansion of the diaphragm, we get that real deep connection with the diaphragm when we’re doing the breathing, which then starts to wake up the pelvic floor. So, because they’re best friends—well, they should be best friends—but they kind of, through dysfunction, through pregnancy, through childbirth, through posture, through someone’s job maybe, they’ve kind of fallen out a little bit. They’re not really talking, and it’s actually getting that communication between the pelvic floor and the diaphragm going again.
It’s so important to have those two parts working together. So, when we’re going for the traditional route of just strengthening our pelvic floor because we’re told it’s weak, it’s the wrong message because we’re just treating one area of the body, which is the pelvic floor, and not its best friend, who is like, “Hello, what about me?” Because with them both working really well together, we’re going to have much better function, because everything in the body is connected. So, I think that’s the thing with traditional medicine—we treat symptoms in isolation, and we’re not looking at the bigger picture of what else is included, what else needs to be treated, and what else needs to be corrected or helped so that we can make a proper and full recovery, rather than just giving something for where the symptoms are and not really looking at the bigger picture.
So, with regards to the pelvic floor, it’s deeply connected to the diaphragm, its best friend, and those deep core connections. So, deep core muscles also all connect in. So, in getting the diaphragm and the pelvic floor working together as they should do, we start to get what we call co-activation, where other muscles are like, “Hey, this is good. I’m going to join in, and I’m going to work better.” And so, generally, much better muscle function throughout the whole body—the whole system.
So, yeah, that’s—I mean, the pelvic floor is there for kind of the support of your pelvic organs. And so, the wording, the language that we use is very much—oh, my clients tell me, “I’ve been told I’ve got a very weak pelvic floor, and I’ve got to strengthen it.” And although the strength of the muscles is important, the overall function is much more important. So, for example, we don’t always need our pelvic floor to be super strong. So, if we’re training it all the time to be strong and to contract, there’s going to be times when we don’t need it to do that, and that’s actually fairly unhelpful.
So, that’s my issue with kind of traditional training, is that we focus on where the issue is—the pelvic floor—and we’re just kind of giving stuff, mostly squeezing for the pelvic floor, and not everything else that it’s connected to, that needs to be improved as well to get the bigger picture.
Lori Phillips:
Yeah, yeah. Well, so, what does it look like to have a healthy pelvic floor, and what organs does it support? You’re talking about women’s health, and the organs that it supports are female organs, as in the uterus and those kinds of things?
Nikki Scott:
Absolutely. The bladder, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, in a healthy body, we are able to go and do all the activities we want to do without getting any symptoms—so, without leaking, without putting any stress at all on the pelvic floor. You know, it does—if you exercise…
So, the reason that we get the stress on the pelvic floor is because we get big rises in the pressure inside us. So, we’re like this pressure canister—our core is like this pressure canister—and the rises in pressure happen when we exercise, sneeze, cough, laugh, move—you know, I’m moving my hands—that creates small rises in pressure. So, it’s not that the pressure is a problem, but it’s a problem if we’ve got dysfunction. Because if, say, for example, you sneeze, that’s a really high bout of intra-abdominal pressure that happens. And if we don’t have the co-activation of our core, and our pelvic floor, and our diaphragm, and everything working together, then there’s going to be a problem. And that’s usually why I say women don’t jump after they have kids—they don’t go on a trampoline, they don’t run, they don’t do high-impact stuff so much—because they worry about those rises in pressure. That’s what it is—it’s the rises in pressure that find their weak spot that then give them the issues. So, in a healthy person, you wouldn’t have any issue with that.
So, the thing being with hypopressives is we would love women to know about them—not just women because men have pelvic floors as well—but we would love women to know about hypopressives and be doing them as a preventative. So, to be doing them—you talked about your daughters—you know, in the future, they may have children. So, wouldn’t it be great if they did hypopressives regularly as a preventative?
However, most people will only go find a solution for something when they’ve got a problem.
Lori Phillips:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nikki Scott:
So, it’s a really difficult one. So, I’ve got sons, and they’re twins, so they started doing hypopressives more regularly because they’ve been doing quite a lot of weightlifting, they do quite a lot of bodybuilding stuff. And again, with something like lifting heavy weights, we’re having sharp rises of intra-abdominal pressure, and the system needs to be able to handle it. And when it can’t handle it in a male body like that, we get the signs maybe of a hernia.
So, hernias can happen because the body can’t handle that pressure. And lower back pain—so one of my sons was starting to get what he thought was an abdominal hernia, so we could just see a little bulge in the abdominal line. And my other son intermittently gets lower back problems. And that’s due to the pressure in the system finding the weak spot. So again, they do 10-15 minutes or so, when they’ve trained, of hypopressives, and it resets the system. And as long as they’re doing that in a young body like that, they’re preventing the backache from getting worse, the hernia from getting worse, you know, other things happening around them. So, it would be great if we could instil that in everyone. But as I said, it’s a difficult one because you think, “Why would I do that? I don’t have a problem.”
Lori Phillips:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you describe a hypopressive exercise? Like, what does that mean or what does that look like?
Nikki Scott:
So, the word itself means low pressure, which doesn’t really describe what it does. It’s—so, it’s hypopressives, so low pressure, but like I said, it doesn’t really describe what it does. So, there’s two things: there’s breathing, and then there’s postures. So, then you think, “Well, that sounds really like Pilates,” or “That sounds really like yoga.” And yes, you’d be correct in that, in that it does look similar. But there are a few little differences in that, as I said, we do targeted lateral breathing. So, we’re trying to get the diaphragm, when we’re doing the breathing, we’re really trying to get the diaphragm to stretch, not just drop down, not just belly breathe. We actually don’t want to see an inflation of the lower belly; we want to see more of a stretch of the ribs, which people can find really tricky because a lot of people are quite tense and stuck in that area.
So, with the breathing, improving the diaphragm and improving that relationship with the pelvic floor through the breathing, we also do a breath hold. And some people might have seen this—it creates the breath hold, it creates this vacuum effect, which again is… we’ve had discussion with yoga teachers about this being the same as, uh, I think it’s called Udana Bandha. But actually, it’s not the same. And having had those discussions, it’s great because we can kind of put it all out there and say it isn’t the same. We’re trying to activate a reflex. So, we want the body to do this vacuum, but in a subconscious way.
So, we do conscious things—I know it sounds hard to explain without actually seeing it—but we do conscious things that create a subconscious vacuum. And the reason we want that subconscious activation is because that’s the way our muscles work—they don’t just work always on being squeezed and clenched and consciously activating them. They also need to work by themselves.
And again, I’m going to go back to that example of the sneeze, where it takes you by surprise. You don’t have a chance to clench every muscle that you need to handle the pressure of the sneeze. So, you need your little army of muscles working in the background to handle that pressure.
So, we do the lateral breathing, we do the breath hold, and so we’ve got that connection and that subconscious activation. And then we use that breathing within certain postures because, as I described at the beginning, we are this web—everything’s connected. So, any unwanted tension in our posture is going to add to pelvic floor dysfunction. So, you know, we know that kind of hunched forward, tight position where we have lots of tension at the front of our body, is not helpful generally for our posture. It creates pain discomfort. So, when we do these postures, we’re trying to train our posterior chain—our back-stabilising muscles—to hold us up and do their job rather than being stretched forward because of the tension at the front. So, we’re releasing that tension at the front, and we’re increasing it where we need it in our big stabilising muscles. So, that’s what it looks like.
And when I teach it, I teach eight postures. And those eight postures, you start standing up, and you finish lying down. So, it’s a nice little flow. Once you’ve learned it—and that’s kind of what I’m doing every day, just 10-15 minutes. Mainly, I try and get away with as little as possible! And that’s my maintenance. I feel like I don’t need to do any more than that because that’s what keeps me where I am and stops me from having any issues and still being able to go to the gym and do all the things that I enjoy.
Lori Phillips:
Yeah, lovely. Okay, so if people want to find out more about your programme and your exercises, how can they find you?
Nikki Scott:
I’ve got a really nice freebie which gives them a little bit more information. And actually, if they go to my website, which is ukhypopressives.com, there’s a pop-up box that comes up. Just fill it out, and then you’ll get sent the freebie, which will explain in a little bit more depth about what hypopressives is what it does. And there’s actually a nice little video on there that they can use to start getting them doing that lateral breathing. So, we’re explaining it and teaching it for them.
And then, if they wanted to go further, I have various online options. They can book a discovery call with me—that’s free as well. But there’s also an ability to book some one-to-one sessions or also to book our complete beginners’ online course. So, there are lots of different ways, but if you’re a bit unsure, probably the best way would be to download the freebie and find out a little bit more about hypopressives and what it might help you with.
Lori Phillips:
Yeah, well, that’s awesome. Thank you for that. And yeah, so what we’ll do is we’ll link that in the comments after we finish.
Nikki Scott:
Yes.
Lori Phillips:
So, would you like to tell the Be Awesome Network maybe just one more thought? I know that you’re very passionate, and we haven’t really gotten into your full story, but would you like to tell us just maybe one tip or one thought to end our time today, just to get the awareness out there and to maybe put people at ease who might be struggling?
Nikki Scott:
I think a lot of women suffer and think it’s only them. Whenever I get on calls with people, they’re unaware of the high percentage of women that have things like prolapses when they’ve had children. And they’re quite young, and they really just think it’s just them. So, there’s a very high percentage of women that are struggling and have problems with things like that. So, I don’t want them to feel isolated and alone. But when they’re going out and asking for help if they know that the treatment that they’ve been given—it’s really not working—they’ve given it some time, and they don’t want to have surgery, because I can understand why they wouldn’t want to.
They just need to be empowered to be able to go back to their health professional and say, “This isn’t good enough. You need to signpost me to a more holistic option.” There are things out there, like scar release therapy. We don’t do anything for women that have tears or birth scars. We’re not giving them any information about what they should be doing with those scars after they’ve had their children.
So, it’s really empowering them to stand up for themselves and not be fobbed off with, you know, like the information that I was given, which is, “What do you expect? You’ve had twins. Come back when it’s worse.” And that’s just not—it’s not fair. If someone’s telling you that, you need to go to someone else and find your own pathway, really, because you can recover. And the quicker you do it, the sooner you do it, the longer you leave it, the harder it’s going to be to kind of get back there.
So, that’s why it’s really great to kind of have newly postnatal mums that want to do something about their healing journey. But also, if you are slightly older and you’re thinking, “Well, you know, this is my lot now. This is just how it is.” It isn’t—it can be improved. We can help you recover back, you know, and not live with such awful symptoms. So, don’t ever feel like you’re a lost cause because you certainly aren’t, and there’s plenty that can be done holistically. You just have to dig deep to find it, really.
Lori Phillips:
Yeah, well, I appreciate you coming on and sharing your message and raising awareness. So, thank you so much, Nikki, for your time today. It’s awesome!
Nikki Scott:
Thank you!
Lori Phillips:
Yeah. Well, if you’re listening right now and you’re interested in learning more about the pelvic floor—and this can be for male or female—then please reach out to Nikki. We’re going to link her info below, and thank you, Nikki, for the freebie that you’re willing to give—that’s amazing.
Nikki Scott:
You’re welcome. Thank you—it’s been great!
Lori Phillips:
Yeah. Well, I just want to remind you, if you’re listening right now, that you are awesome, and we can be awesome together. And that’s really what it’s all about. Every area of our lives can use some attention. So, I really appreciate you, Nikki, just coming on and sharing this area with us, and, yeah, I look forward to future endeavours. It’s been great!
Nikki Scott:
Yeah, thank you.
Lori Phillips:
Alright, well, we’ll see you guys next time, and in the meantime, go be awesome!
