I had an amazing time with all of you who joined me at my live Hypopressives Q&A recently. Now, here’s the rewatch! I recommend you watch this, as we had some fantastic questions.
If you aren’t able to watch right now, or you want to listen while on the go. You can download the MP3 of my Hypopressives Q&A using this link: MP3 Version
Here’s another bonus for you. Below is the transcript of my video.
Hypopressives Q&A Transcript:
Nikki: Hey, so hello and welcome everybody to this wonderful Q&A session that you’ve all turned up for. As I said before, this is about you getting the information you need without the fuss and empowering yourself to go forward and get the right treatment. And that might be something that I can offer, or it might be something you find outside of it, but it’s all about actually knowing what you need and being able to go out there and find it.
Every other month I’m here doing this Q&A session, and on the alternate months, we have guests. We usually have guests that come in on, you know, whatever subject that I think would be good for you and whatever I think would be a subject that needs more exposure.
So last month we had Caroline, and I did send out the recordings to your mailing list. Hopefully, you’ve managed to catch up on that. Caroline was a hypnotherapist, so there was some really useful stuff. It might be your bag, it might not be.
Next month, we have Nicola Farndell, who is similar to me. She’s a Women’s Health Coach, but dealing really with menopause and perimenopause and giving you your power back through menopause. Helping you with all aspects of menopause, so that would be a good one for you to turn up to as well. That’s on the 7th of November in the evening.
If there’s any suggestions that you could give me of things you’d like to know a little bit more about, then you can put those in the chat box as well. If there’s anything as we go along, then just add your comments in the chat box.
As I said, I’ve got some questions, and if we just stick with those questions, then it may be that this isn’t a very long session, which is fine. We have an hour, but we don’t have to take the whole hour.
So, I’m just going to start with a little bit of a chat about a workshop I did recently because in that workshop, there were nine women. Most of them had kind of seen each other because they were all people that went to a gym, a little community gym together. Most of them had kind of seen each other or knew each other or were friends. They all kind of had different reasons or felt like they had different reasons, or probably hadn’t talked about their reasons as to why they’d come to that workshop.
It was really just kind of a dip-your-toes find out a little bit more about Hypopressives and how it helps pelvic floor dysfunction and recovering, you know, how to recover from it. One of the nice things that I did this time, and it’s something that I do online, is to ask you to—you know, you can always keep your question, anything you’re asking me, you can keep it personal by just directing it straight to me, and then we can talk about it when we’re not recording it.
But again, with these women, I wanted to do a similar thing where I asked them their reason for being there. I just thought it would be a nice way to start this session off, to read some of the things they said so that you can appreciate that everyone feels the same. It doesn’t matter what age you are, because probably the oldest person there was in her late 60s, early 70s, and the youngest was probably the lady who’d literally just given birth 3 weeks before. I would say she’s probably mid-30s. The rest of the people that were there, they slotted in between.
There were a few ladies that had young children and a few ladies that had older children. The lady who was the oldest there had never had any children. Again, I’m just telling you all these details because for the majority of women that have issues, it’s because of giving birth. It’s because of pregnancy, and it’s because of giving birth due to the extra stress on the system.
But it’s not always, and you know, often in a group of 10 people, you’ll find one or two that have never had children. It just proves that that doesn’t have to be the case. Sometimes, I’ve seen top athletes—runners, gymnasts—that have severe pelvic floor dysfunction and have never had children. That’s just down to the nature of their training, their training regime, and that inefficiency to be able to handle the pressure that their training causes.
So although we were all sitting here, and whatever issues brought us here are more than likely to do with when we had our kids, it’s not always.
I’m not going to read any names out. I’m just literally going to read what people wrote. So, I said to them, “Give me your contact details. Tell me a little bit about yourself if you want to, or just put a sentence as to why you’re here.”
So, the first one is: Since the menopause, I don’t feel safe or confident. Well, that’s quite powerful, I think.
Then this one: Had my youngest 12 years ago and never was consistent with pelvic floor exercises. Have had bladder urgency since and would like to tackle this.
This one’s quite long, actually. I can read if I put my glasses on, actually.
Had a fibroid embolisation procedure over a year ago as I experienced regular need to go to the loo and became paranoid, so ended up wearing period pants. I altered my diet. This did not do a huge amount to change symptoms. Since the procedure, I now manage things well. However, post-period, I have more need to go to the loo. Incontinence then, and after a few days, symptoms disappear. My reason for this workshop is as a mum of three, one C-section, one with shoulder… distortion… you know the word—I can’t quite read her writing—and very large, 9 pounds, 12 ounces. And I’m petite. So yeah, that’s quite a detailed one, that one.
And then this lady says: This workshop has come at a good time—2 weeks postpartum. Two other children. This is my third. Had issues with the second baby. Lots of pelvic floor difficulties. In the end, I had a back injury and this meant I had to stop working. This is when I worked on my pelvic floor. Need to ensure this doesn’t happen again, so want to be on top of it.
Then we have: Would be lovely to run, sneeze, cough, etc. without leaking.
And: For pelvic floor strengthening, had two children in 2010 and 2012. Struggle with leaking, especially coughing, laughing. Done pelvic floor squeezes, but hasn’t improved. I want to be able to trust my body again. It doesn’t feel like it belongs to me. It feels unsettled.
That one really resonated with me because when I had my boys, that was one thing. I would always describe my body as disconnected from me, like it just didn’t feel like it worked together.
So maybe there’s a few of you thinking the same thing, and we can certainly work on that.
Used to play lots of sports and now too nervous to do anything else but swimming because of fear of leaking. Had a Gynie check-up and she recommended working on the pelvic floor, but she wasn’t too concerned as she said my pelvic floor was weaker but not bad and no sign of a prolapse. But, you know, as women, I think we know ourselves. We know our own bodies, and sometimes when you’re told things like that, it kind of almost feels a bit dismissive of what we can feel and kind of takes that power away, really.
I have suffered with urge incontinence since having my first child 6 and a half years ago.
And that’s it. I just wanted to read some of those out because actually when you put them all together, they’re quite similar, you know. We’re all looking at similar things. There’s a few in there that, like I said, there’s the lady that didn’t have any children.
Menopause is a big one for causing a massive upheaval in the body just because it’s a stage of our womanhood, and it’s a stage of our ageing process, unfortunately. The ageing process we cannot stop, but we can put things in place that can slow things down and make it not feel so hideous.
So, with things like, you know, if you’re going through symptoms of the menopause and it’s having a knock-on effect on pelvic floor dysfunction that you might have, or symptoms, then, you know, you need to be thinking about doing something about it.
OK, so we’re gonna dive in now. Just sort of start with that. So, that was kind of where I’m going with my workshops, and I really would like to start having more of these uncomfortable conversations because I think the more we can all be in a room, or all be on Zoom like this, and know that we’re not alone, it’s quite powerful.
Actually, to be able to go to our medical professionals and say, “This just isn’t good enough,” and we know it’s not good enough, but without us standing up and saying, “We’re actually telling people we’re going privately, we’re going and finding holistic treatments that work because you’re unable to offer it. But why are you unable to offer it?” That’s the only way we’re gonna get anybody to change anything, is to stand up and say, “This isn’t good enough.” And it isn’t good enough. I mean, it’s a shambles really.
So, yeah, I’ll get off my soapbox now. OK.
So, have we got Diane? Is this Diane? You sent me a couple of questions in, is that right?
Yes. OK, Diane is here. So, Diane says, What would be the ideal amount? What would the ideal amount of time be when doing the breath holds?
There isn’t an ideal time. OK, so when you first start doing Hypopressives and you’re holding your breath, you shouldn’t be able to hold it for a long period of time. Usually, if you are able—like right at the beginning—to hold your breath for a long period of time, like 10 seconds plus, then what that means is you’re not actually achieving a vacuum. You’re not getting rid of all of the air.
So, when you first start, that urge to breathe usually comes around 5 seconds. So, when I’m teaching beginners, I would usually do a bit of a 5-second count, especially if I’ve got a few people in the class, to give them an average. Some people will be able to hold their breath for longer, and some people will be able to hold their breath for less. So, in the beginning, around 5 seconds is a good range.
But what you’ll find is, as you get it more and as you practise it more, then the amount of time you hold your breath will become longer. So, that’s progressing it, yeah? That’s progressing the effect. So actually, then that’s, you know, that’s a good thing because it’s a training progression.
However long you want to hold your breath for is up to you. If you can hold your breath for a long time, great. You just want that next breath that you take to be in the same rhythm as all your other breathing. So if you find that you’re really holding your breath and you’re thinking, “I really need to breathe,” and then you go to take that next breath in, then you’ve held it for too long. It shouldn’t be a desperate gasp. If I watched you, it would be seamless. You’d just go straight into your next breath as if, but you’d still feel like you needed to breathe, but there wouldn’t be that desperate need to breathe. Does that make sense?
And usually, the longer that you’re practising it for, the more you can hold your breath. But I—I can’t be bothered myself, so I know that sounds terrible, but I do maintenance now because I don’t have pelvic floor dysfunction that bothers me. It’s still going to be there because it’s a weakness that will—or it’s a bit of dysfunction that has come from having twins and living my life, and it’s… so it’s going to be there, and I’m just managing it.
But in order for me to manage it, when I do my flow, there’ll be some postures where I like to hold my breath for a bit longer because I like the feeling of the depth of the vacuum. So, some of the things like all fours, things like half bent over—the vacuum feels deeper, and I like to hold my breath for longer, but not past that point of it being in the same rhythm. Does that make sense?
So, you know, even in all fours, if I’m like 15 seconds in and I get a really strong urge to breathe, as long as I’m not going *gasping sound* to get the air in, and it’s just the same as normal, then that’s fine. So, just play around with the postures that you find it easier to hold your breath in for longer. It won’t be sitting with your legs extended or sitting cross-legged because those are just really, really hard to hold your breath for long periods of time anyway, because of the way that your muscles are working to hold you up. They’re just not natural positions for you to do long breath holds in.
You can try it, but there isn’t an ideal amount of time, yeah? That’s the answer to that. If you’re really doing lots of short breath holds all the time, then try and push it out longer, but there’s no optimal time that you should hold it for, OK?
And then Diane also says, What would be the telltale signs of having a tight pelvic floor?
So, I’m presuming you mean hypertonic, where there’s areas where there’s too much tone. It would be that your incontinence symptoms get worse. For example, if you have urge incontinence, where you really can’t hold it, that even with all of your might of using your pelvic floor, you still leak everywhere. It may be painful because it’s a little bit like, say for example, you’ve been on the computer for hours on end and you suddenly go to move, and you get that real sharp pain in your scapular area where you’ve just been sitting in that position because you’ve been busy working away.
So, often you need to have a little bit of a pressure point, so someone needs to kind of press on that area to let the muscles know that they can release. And that’s exactly the same with your pelvic floor. The areas become really, really tight and unable to contract or release, and just become locked up. They actually need a bit of internal release work to be done in order to get some of that function back.
So, it’s when they kind of get into that chronic phase, where they can’t really do anything and all they’re doing is causing you pain. You might feel spasms or pain. If you’ve got a tight pelvic floor, often with scars—if you’ve got birth scars, like an episiotomy or any tears—then they can become overtight from doing pelvic floor squeezes. Because areas of the scar will already be, there’ll already be areas that are tighter anyway. So, in doing pelvic floor squeezes, you just end up with areas of complete dysfunction around the scar tissue.
That’s when you may have to go and see someone who does internal pressure point release. I had to do that. I had an episiotomy, and no one said anything to me about doing any work on my scars, or that pelvic floor squeezes may make it worse. That was just what was given to help me with my incontinence. And over a period of, I would say, eight years—maybe less than that—of doing regular pelvic floor squeezes, it just literally got to the point where I couldn’t stop weeing myself because the muscles just got so locked up.
In the end, I went privately to a Women’s Health Physio who helped me release it. It’s very painful. And if you know that you’ve got areas that are going to get stuck again, whoever you see to help you may advise you to get a wand. So, they do these glass wands that you can use internally to do it yourself because you can find the bits where it hurts, and tell you.
I mean, it’s the same—I’m a trained massage therapist as well. When you’re doing pressure point release, you actually, for example, you’re working on someone’s shoulders or their neck or their back, you find that point that’s really painful and stuck, and you gradually increase pressure on it until it releases off. You can almost feel the tissue around it kind of going, “Ohh, thank you,” like releasing and giving way as you do that. So, yeah, it’s the same sort of thing, but internally.
So, signs of having a tight pelvic floor would be that, you know, if you’ve got incontinence, it gets worse. If you’ve got a prolapse, you get more symptomatic because often with tightness or tension—which is what we’re talking about—the tension will cause a pull. If you’ve already got a prolapse, it’s going to pull on that even more and make it even worse. So, you might find that if you’ve got a prolapse and your pelvic floor is really tight, then the symptoms of your prolapse worsen as well.
Let’s let someone in. OK.
So, OK, I see you hear these terms, but how can an individual know what this is for themselves? So, I mean, hypertonic just means too much tone. So, high tone—or not too much tone, but high tone—is basically what that word means.
So, if someone says to you, “You’ve got a hypertonic pelvic floor,” that usually means there’s too much tone somewhere in some of the muscles or some of the areas.
And if you have a scar… Are you—do you have a birth scar? Just nod your head or you can—yes, you do. And are you doing pelvic floor squeezes? You are? So, I would just suggest that you stop doing them because they are just counterproductive to what you want. All they’re doing is adding more tension. So, unless you’re working on your scar and having some internal release work done, all those squeezes are just creating more and more and more build-up of tension in areas where you don’t need it.
And, you know, I know myself, when my kids were twelve, I was just at a point where I thought, “You know, this is ridiculous. I’ve done all the things I’m supposed to do. I’ve been doing my pelvic floor squeezes. I’ve been doing all my stuff that I learned on my PT course. None of it was working.”
That’s when I kind of went down the route of Hypopressives. It’s all about being able to relax your pelvic floor and allow it to work as it should do.
Often, I get asked, “Oh, when I’m doing my breath, once I’ve held my breath, do I have to squeeze my pelvic floor?” No. Just stop. Stop squeezing your pelvic floor. Stop squeezing your abdominals. Stop trying to hold everything in. It’s not how a functioning body works, yeah? It needs to be able to relax and just move when it needs to move, contract and release when it needs to contract and release.
So, if you feel like you’re going down the route of a hypertonic pelvic floor, then you probably need to find someone privately—a Women’s Health Physio—that can help you release that. But ask those questions because a lot of private Women’s Health Physios don’t do that internal work, so you need to find someone quite specific.
OK, lovely.
Mary: My question is about the lateral breathing part of Hypopressives. Is the intention that we eventually breathe laterally automatically all the time to keep that connection between the diaphragm and pelvic floor?
Nikki: No, it isn’t, OK? So, what we’re doing is we are, by getting the diaphragm and the pelvic floor to work together, yes, when we’re doing activities where we need to fill our lungs more and expand the diaphragm more—say, for example, you might go for a bit of a fast walk up a hill—then you’re going to breathe better. You’re going to be able to expand and use your diaphragm, so your big breathing muscles are going to be able to be used a lot better.
In that activity, your pelvic floor will be oscillating and moving and connecting because they have such a good relationship. But that relationship is built and changed through doing your Hypopressive practice. Just the same as you do your yoga practice and your yoga breathing for your flexibility, your movement, and all of the wonderful benefits from yoga, it’s the same with Hypopressives. You do your breathing within your session. Yes, you do get some changes, but it doesn’t mean to say that now we all go around doing lateral breathing. It just means that you’re breathing better without realising it, yeah?
And we’ve got much more autonomic control. So, you know, when we’re going to sneeze, when we go to cough, when we have to run down the road, or if our dog’s run off, or our child’s run off, or whatever it is, we know that our whole system is working much better. We won’t have that weakness in our system or dysfunction in our system.
So, I like to liken it to a gym session. If you go for a gym session, you’re going for a gym session and you’re thinking, “I want to keep my muscle tone, so I’m doing these exercises because they’re really good for building muscle and muscle retention.” But you don’t have to walk around all day doing squats, overhead presses, and bicep curls to keep that. It just happens in that session, and then the next time you go, you build a little bit more muscle, and you do a little bit more training.
It’s the same with Hypopressives. Hypopressives starts to reprogram those pathways from the brain to the muscles, and once they’re reprogrammed, unless you stop doing it, they’re going to keep in that groove because it works better for your body.
So, hopefully, that makes sense to everybody. Does that make sense, Mary? You can unmute yourself if you want to.
Mary: Can you hear?
Nikki: Me. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, that makes sense. Yeah, so, you know, when we’re doing that breathing, it’s about the effects that it’s having outside of the session, but it doesn’t mean to say that we’re going to go around doing lateral breathing. But I just know that when I’m doing sport and stuff…
Mary: It does.
Nikki: You know, when I need my system to work for me and I can’t always activate muscles consciously, then my autonomic system is right in there because it’s been conditioned that way through my Hypopressives sessions. That’s what’s so great about Hypopressives—you don’t have to spend hours doing it to effect a change. Change starts to happen the minute you start to breathe better. It’s fantastic.
There’s a really good video that someone did—a presentation on breathing—and she showed this video of the way that the diaphragm is so connected to the heart, the brain, that it’s just like unbelievable. When you do that big lateral breath, the knock-on effect it has all the way through your body… especially with the brain in mind, you know, it’s not just the physical changes that you get from doing that breathing, but it’s the mental changes as well. That’s what’s so key with it.
OK. Jane says: Is it really possible to have a prolapse? I have a grade three cystocele and a tight pelvic floor.
Yes, so, that’s funny because that’s a similar question to what Diane asked about a tight pelvic floor. Yes, absolutely, because tight or loose… I mean, I think people tend to think that when you’ve got a prolapse, everything’s loose and falling out like jelly and nothing works properly. That isn’t always the case. We can be dysfunctional but really, really tight and have lots of tension.
So, it is really possible to have a prolapse and a tight pelvic floor. If you’re doing pelvic floor squeezes when you have a prolapse and a tight pelvic floor, and if there are scars in play, then every time you do a pelvic floor squeeze, you’re making your prolapse and your tight pelvic floor worse. So, I told you I wasn’t going to fluff it—you’ve got to stop doing pelvic floor squeezes if you have scars. You’ve got to sort your scars out, and you might never go back to your pelvic floor squeezes because you might never need to if you’re doing your Hypopressives.
But if you’ve got a tight pelvic floor, you need to have some of that internal pressure point release or some sort of work done on your scars in order to be able to prepare that tissue to then work properly through Hypopressives.
I started doing Hypopressives and probably a month in, I was like, “Not feeling any benefits here at all.” I was talking to a Women’s Health physio and she said, “Let’s just have a look at you and do an exam and see what’s going on.” That’s when she was like, “Oh, your pelvic floor is just… there’s areas that are so tight, there’s so much tension there, that we need to get rid of some of that so that it can…” It was almost like, “Oh, geez, thank you.” And then the Hypopressives started to work really well.
So, it’s not always just the solution to do Hypopressives, as I say. Sometimes, there are other things that you need to be looking out for and getting help with.
Jane says I’ve been told a lot of my discomfort comes from overtight pelvic floor muscles.
Yeah.
Burning, aching, difficulty in relaxing the pelvic area, as well as from the actual prolapse. Truly, a prolapse means loose muscle tone, no?
No. All a prolapse means is that the organ or organs have moved out of position. That’s all it means. Prolapse means to move out of position. What medical professionals do is they’ll grade it—from zero to four, four being completely out of the body. But even completely out of the body, there can still be tension and tightness in the pelvic floor, because any dysfunction in the pelvic floor will mean it’s not working properly, so therefore it’s not doing its job of supporting.
So that presumption that prolapse means that everything’s sagging and falling out isn’t the case at all. All it means is that usually, it’s tension that’s pulled it out of position, pulled the organ out of position. So, every woman that’s had a baby will have had a prolapse, yeah? And they may have had a minor prolapse and never had any symptoms until they went through the menopause.
So, you know, there may be people on this call who’ve never really had any symptoms—maybe had a little bit of incontinence afterwards, but they got on top of it and they were able to kind of get on with their life, and then started to go through the menopause and started to get symptoms. Again, the symptoms are there because, in that case, the lack of hormones or the change in hormones causes that laxity in the tissue.
The tissue is changing; it’s ageing, ultimately. We don’t want to hear that word, but the tissue’s ageing. In the case of menopause and perimenopause, it can be laxity. A lot of the time with prolapses, you’re given pelvic floor squeezes for everything that comes under that umbrella of women’s health and pelvic floor dysfunction. In my opinion, prolapse and scars… pelvic floor squeezes just do not work because they’re just the wrong thing to be giving that person.
Pelvic floor squeezes are just working on the pelvic floor. I mean, we know that it’s connected to the diaphragm, right? We know that that big breathing muscle has a massive part to play in what happens with the pelvic floor, right? And yet, we’re still only giving women something that squeezes the area where they’ve got the symptoms. So, it’s about getting away from that thought that it’s to do with your pelvic floor that’s the issue, and just looking at the bigger picture.
It may be lots and lots of things that are going into play, but certainly with prolapse, it doesn’t mean loose muscle tone. Not necessarily. And it’s possible to have both, yes.
So, hopefully, that answered your question, Jane.
Mary, you wrote to me in an e-mail and you said your question was around older ladies and leaky bladders, so I was gonna ask you, what specifically did you want to know about that?
Mary: It’s… I first got to know about Hypopressives because I went to see a gynie physio, and they were doing an audit at the time and she asked if I wanted to do a…
Nikki: Yeah.
Mary: Like a six-week block. While I found it really helpful, it came just before COVID. I was able to concentrate on it a lot, and I’ve done a lot. Although I’m fine, I’ve turned 70 now. I find… and it’s a hard way to describe it, but if you can imagine you’ve got water in a saucer and it’s like it’s coming over the sides, you know?
Nikki: Yeah.
Mary: So, for instance, if I get up during the night to go to the loo, I’m getting a little bit of leakage coming out. But it’s not like I’m having to hold everything in—it’s just coming away…
Nikki: Yeah, so a little bit of that is overflow, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s overflow.
Mary: Yeah, so it’s like an overflow, but I’m fine, and I can hold my bladder for ages. I drink a lot of fluids, like I drink a lot of tea and things like that. But I went to decaf. Everything’s decaf now, and that’s made a huge difference. But I find when I do get that urgency—you know, like the key goes in the door and I’m trying to get to the loo—I’m having leakages before I get there.
Nikki: And so, from when you started doing Hypopressives to now, do you find it’s improved or not?
Mary: Well, it did very much initially, but as I say, I think as well, there were a number of factors. You know, going to decaf tea and coffee made a big difference. But also, yes, I felt better within myself when I’d done the Hypopressives, in certain positions.
Nikki: How regularly are you doing them now?
Mary: Probably about… well, I’ve been a bit neglectful of them. I was doing them every day, and then I was doing them maybe about three times a week. I think initially as well, I wasn’t doing them correctly. You know, when you do that breath, I was still bringing my pelvic floor in. So, I don’t think my technique was as good as it could have been.
Nikki: Possibly. What I would say is that it sounds like you need to be doing them really regularly.
Mary: I know.
Nikki: Maybe for, what—how long would you say you’re spending on it? 10 minutes?
Mary: No, longer. Longer, probably maybe 30 minutes to go through the exercises, the range. You know, I have asked for another gynie referral and I’m waiting for it, but there’s probably about a 12-week waiting list. So, I was actually going to go back and speak to the physio and just say, you know, if I could get the opportunity to go through the exercises with her or someone.
Nikki: I mean, have you done any of my training? Have you done any of the…
Mary: Well, I did come on one of your training days. Well, it wasn’t a day. I think I e-mailed you a while ago…All right, I lost my son…because I was due to go on a training day.
Nikki: Yeah, take your time.
Mary: …and I just never got back to doing it.
Nikki: OK. Well, that’s very understandable. So, here’s the thing. Your diaphragm is a muscle that holds emotion, OK? There’s obviously a long way to go before you’re going to feel anywhere near normal, and that may never happen, because that’s a big thing, isn’t it? So, your diaphragm probably is quite tight and holding a lot of emotion. Do you feel a lot of tension in that diaphragm? Anxiety, maybe?
Mary: Yeah.
Nikki: In order to…
Mary: I think when I got the initial examination, the physio did say I was very, very tight. Yeah, I was very, very small. My son had been born prematurely, you know, like 40 years ago, and I did have scar tissue. You know, once I started doing that desensitisation thing, you know, a little bit, it did make a difference.
Nikki: Did it make a difference?
Mary: Yeah, but, you know, it’s all stemming from getting older. The bladder has become more of an issue.
Nikki: I think if you could get into a really good habit of—even if you just did some lateral breathing whilst you’re lying on the floor—really get your diaphragm to start to work and stretch like it should do, so your rib cage is really stretching apart. And then you start to bring in some of the breath holds, and really work on your technique. Then, whatever postures you’ve learned, because the thing is, because you’re talking about someone else showing you, there might be some other things that we can do.
But if you’ve got a good routine of postures anyway, you know, just gradually bring yourself back into doing them every day. But I would say, try and do a bit of targeted breathing on the floor because that’s gonna really help with the kind of the emotion, the emotional release…
Mary: Right.
Nikki: …before you go straight into doing the postures. If you’ve got time, you know, and you’ve got that half an hour, you’ve got 5 or 10 you could spend on just really getting yourself into a good rhythm with the breath.
Mary: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I do find it very relaxing. You know, like, I treat it as a bit of a mindful exercise in a week because it is very relaxing to do it.
Nikki: Yeah.
Mary: But I don’t think my technique was probably, you know, I think I was still holding that tension.
Nikki: Well, I mean, I’m quite happy to do a session with you on Zoom, if you want to let me have a look at anything that you’re doing. So, if that’s something you’re interested in, we can definitely do that. Or, you know, like I say, I’ve still got online stuff where there are videos that you can watch for technique, yeah.
Mary: OK.
Nikki: That would probably be my advice, but just be easy on yourself. You know, the diaphragm holds worry, tension, stress, and what that means for you—and for anyone that’s feeling like that—is that a tight, restricted diaphragm is going to make it really hard for you to do that lateral breathing. But because its best friend is your pelvic floor, then that’s going to be tight and restricted as well. So, in order to release your diaphragm…
Mary: Yeah.
Nikki: …and release that tension a little bit, you need to get back into that habit of doing a bit more lateral targeted breathing, OK?
Mary: OK. Alright, I’ll give it a go.
Nikki: Be gentle with yourself. Thank you so much for sharing that. And like I say, reach out if you want me to look at any of that, yeah?
Mary: Thank you.
Nikki: We’re going to go to the chat now. Here we go. Now I can’t see… Mia’s got a question. A few questions, that’s good. How long before you start seeing results? God, there we go. That one always comes up, doesn’t it? It’s a bit like, “How long is a piece of string?” really, because it depends on what your start point is, as in what’s going on with you.
And so, symptoms… maybe you have lots of different things going on, or you might just have one set of symptoms. Usually, what I would say is you go through this learning phase. So, when you’re learning it, you’re not really doing that consistent breathing that you do in the flow. So, you have to go through that, but you can still see results within that learning phase.
So, the first three months, I would say that you’re doing Hypopressives, you’re still tweaking, you’re still getting used to it, you’re still in that learning phase. So, still doing between 10 and 20 minutes, but it’s more broken-up practice. Usually, by the end of that three months, you should start to see some symptom relief. It might not have gone completely away—whatever it is that you want to go away—and it might never go completely away because, like I say, it depends on the severity in the first place.
But if at three months you can honestly say that your symptoms are the same as when you started, then what I would say is you need more of a multifaceted approach. You’d need to be thinking about talking to a Women’s Health Physio, Women’s Health Osteopath, someone that does internal pressure point release, someone that can work on your scars if you’ve got them—whoever it is, there are going to be other people that can help you alongside just the same as me.
So, it’s a really hard one to say. Most people, I very rarely get someone say at that three-month point that they feel exactly the same and it’s not doing anything. So yeah, it’s a hard one to say.
OK. So, Would you do your exercises daily? Yes, I would always say get into a habit of doing 10 to 20 minutes a day. Absolutely.
And should I be able to feel the pelvic floor contraction when feeling the vacuum? Absolutely not. No, no. Just get away from that whole feeling about squeezing your pelvic floor because that’s not what’s happening with your pelvic floor at all. Sometimes—and I’m going to say this, but now if this isn’t happening for you, then don’t worry about it—but sometimes, in some of the postures, it feels like you’ve done a pelvic floor squeeze, but you haven’t consciously done it. That’s the feeling.
So, for me, it was first noticeable in the bent-over positions because there was less work in holding me up in posture and more work towards the floor, like going with gravity. That meant that I could feel that, but it took months before I felt that. And then one day, it was just a bit like, “Oh, that was like I did an internal squeeze, and I didn’t.”
So, you should not be thinking that you should feel anything when you’re doing the lateral breathing with your pelvic floor. It should all come from the diaphragm, because there’s no way that one can work without the other, yeah? Which is why pelvic floor squeezes just don’t make sense in isolation at all. I just don’t like them, as you can probably tell.
So, hopefully, that’s answered that.
Christine. Yeah.
Christine says I’ve got a couple of male clients that have a beer belly and have diastasis recti because of it. Would Hypopressives be good for them to help with core?
Yes and no. If they don’t want to lose weight and they’ve still got quite a big tummy, then everything’s stretched. It’s a hard one. I would be encouraging them to lose a bit of weight in order to effect a better result, really. That would be my answer to that one. But it’s very common for anyone, especially with that whole “beer belly” posture, to have a diastasis because everything’s stretched, like as if you’re pregnant. But they’re not fat for nine months—they’ve got a beer belly for years, so all of that strain and that weakness across that centre line is much worse, really.
So, I mean, Hypopressives should help to co-activate the core and bring all the muscles together, making everything work better together. But then, if you’ve still got that stretch over the muscles and you’ve still got that gap, there’s only so much you can do. Like I say, if they were leaner, then it would work better.
I told you there was going to be no fluff.
Breathwork is also great to keep the lymphatic system working well. Thank you, Christine.
Up to what grade prolapse can Hypopressives help with? I would say that probably a Grade 4, which is completely outside the body, has to be surgically fixed, if they suggest that, or held in with a pessary. Anything below a 4, then we can usually, and again I can’t promise anything, but we can usually take it back a little bit. So, you know, I’ve seen people with Grade 1, Grade 2 prolapse that have become symptomless, and that’s more important to me than what grade they end up with.
Often, we’ve had people say, “You know what, I had a Grade 2 and now I’ve got a Grade 1, but I don’t have any symptoms.” Often, a prolapse doesn’t go completely— we’re always kind of living and managing our systems. But it’s more about being able to live, being able to go and do those things we want to do, being able to, you know, have a life, do the exercise, do whatever it is we want to do without awful symptoms or without feeling really vulnerable and like our body is working against us.
So, it’s more about that. But Grade 4 is just one of those things where it’s quite hard to effect a change when something is so far out of the body.
OK. And that’s it, that’s all our questions. No more questions, anyone? We’re probably on time. So, we actually ended up talking nearly—we were nearly there on 9:00.
So, is there anyone that’s here, still here? We’ve got eight people left. Got anything that they would like to ask before we go? It’s, you know, I just want you all to know that what we’ve been given with regards to… I mean, this goes back to what my mum was given. My mum’s in her 80s, and she was told to do her pelvic floor squeezes, and she was telling me, like, “Oh, when I was in my 20s, when you have kids, make sure you do your pelvic floor squeezes.” I didn’t, and I’ve got this and I’ve got that.
And, you know, it’s no wonder that we question and we’re worried about not doing pelvic floor squeezes and going against what we’ve been told because that’s the information we’ve been given. We’ve been gaslit, basically, and we’re still being given terrible messages. You know, I hear it every day now. I was told myself, “You’ve had twins, what do you expect?”—by a man. You know, I don’t think anyone should expect to have incontinence. Anyone should expect to be wearing pads, to not be able to do the exercise or do any activities that they love, to not live a full life well into their 80s with any of those issues.
And, you know, yes, we have to age, and yes, our body does change, but we can very much prevent things from happening as we age. We don’t have to think to ourselves, “It’s because I’m this old that that’s why it’s happening to me,” because there’s always something that you can do to help posture and mobility and pelvic floor function. So, yeah.
But I think that’s kind of the key message—don’t be gaslit. You can go do whatever you want to do, whatever age you are, and you shouldn’t have your body fail you. Yes, we have to have kids because men don’t, and we’re superhuman and we do. But, you know, we have to be able to put ourselves back together again. Often, when looking after our kids, we’re not looking after ourselves, and actually, we should be prioritising ourselves a little bit more and making sure we get the right information and the right treatment.
So, that is me, and I’m just going to see what everyone’s saying…
“Thank you. Really interesting.” “Thank you, Nick, that was really helpful.” “Thank you, it’s been really helpful.” “Lovely, perfect.” “Been really informative. Answered questions I didn’t even know I had.”
Excellent. That’s great to hear. Well, it’s lovely to see everyone, and I’ll be back again in… what are we now, October? That’ll be December. Ouch. So, I’ll be back in December, but if you fancy learning a little bit more about menopause, then come and join us at the beginning of November for Nicola’s talk. The details will be e-mailed out to you many, many times. I’ve already created the event.
If there’s anything you think would be useful for you, something you want a bit more information on that maybe I can’t give you, just let me know. Just send me an e-mail, let me know, and I’ll see who I can find that can help us.
And I’m sure… Christine, you should do one of these for me one time! You’re sitting there giving us all this wonderful information about the lymphatic system. But I think we might want to learn about that.
So, I’m going to say goodnight. Sleep well, everyone. Have a great evening, and thank you for joining me.
If you want to find out more about Hypopressives and challenge yourself for 14 days, here is my 14 day challenge.
