The Best Kept Secrets About How to Train Your Bladder (and your puppy)
Did you know that the bladder is one of the most trainable parts of the body? If you’re one of the many women who struggles with incontinence, this is great news! And while the numerous ads and products in stores make it seem as though there’s no help for incontinence other than just dealing with it by wearing adult diapers or pads, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
In this post, I'll be sharing about incontinence and what to do about it including:
Prevalence of Incontinence
Stress vs Urge Incontinence
Bladder Training and Puppy Training (they’re not so different)
JIC’ing and How to Re-Train Your Bladder
Nutritional & Lifestyle Considerations for Bladder Health
Pelvic Floor Role in Urinary Incontinence
When It’s Time to Get Help
So if you or someone you know is dealing with incontinence and are ready for some simple, doable tips to get rid of it, keep reading.
Prevalence of Incontinence
Urinary incontinence is a super common occurrence. In fact, about 25% of young women, 44-57% of middle-aged to postmenopausal women, and 75% of older women struggle with incontinence. Thankfully, incontinence is something that is highly treatable, which can not only help now, but for the long-term. So if you’re a young women in your 20’s or 30’s who has some incontinence on occasion, there’s no better time like the present to work on resolving it as it will affect whether or not you will struggle with it later in life as well.
Even though urinary incontinence may be common, rest assured it’s not something you have to live with and there are things to do about it no matter how old you are.
Stress vs. Urge Incontinence
While we often hear about women saying they leak urine when they sneeze, cough, or workout, this is not the only form of incontinence. Incontinence or leaking of urine with impact or pressure and no urge to pee is called stress incontinence. This commonly happens when running, jumping, coughing, sneezing, singing, yelling, or even just speaking.
The other form of incontinence, and the one I’m going to focus on in this post, is urge incontinence. When the bladder is full, it will send you a message letting you know it needs to be emptied. Unfortunately with urge incontinence, the bladder may start pinging you when it’s not full or close to full yet. When this happens, you get such a sudden urge to pee, it feels as though you’re going to wet your pants so you have to run to the bathroom as soon as possible. Sometimes you may leak, but not always.
Bladder Training and Puppy Training (they’re not so different)
A few months ago we got an 8 week old puppy. Truth be told, I’d never house-trained a puppy before, so I was researching and reading everything I could about the best ways to help our puppy learn to know where to go potty and to communicate with us that she needed to go outside to do so.
A lot of things I read or watched said to take the puppy out every hour to make sure they didn’t have an accident in the house. They also said to continue this schedule at night.
Now I don’t know about you, but if I wake up in the night and feel like I need to use the bathroom, I do all in my power to not get up and go. Why? Because once the bladder empties once at night, it’s going to do it again the next night, and the next, and so on, and so forth. So if you’re taking your puppy to go to the bathroom every hour, you’re basically training your puppy’s bladder that it needs to go every hour. And it will really feel like it needs to. Talk about self-sabotaging your puppy training efforts!
So while I know babies, puppies included, have smaller bladders and need to go more often than we do, going every hour at night is just setting you up for a lot of unnecessary trouble as it’s not natural to have to go as often during the night.
The real secret to bladder (and puppy) training, is to try to go a bit longer between bathroom visits, not to run to the bathroom with every urge to pee or even worse, “just in case” you might need to go. Cause the more often you go, the more often your bladder will feel like it needs to go. Here’s what I mean…
JIC’ing and How to Re-train Your Bladder
If you’ve ever gone to the bathroom “just in case” (JIC) you know what I mean by JIC’ing. It’s when you are about to run errands so you go to the bathroom first, JIC. Or you’re about to go for a run and don’t want to leak, so you go JIC.
The problem with JIC peeing is you’re actually training your bladder to go to the bathroom more and more often. Even if it’s not full. So the first step in re-training your bladder is to be aware if your bladder is actually full or if it’s “pinging" you too early. If you’ve been to the bathroom fifteen minutes ago, you can be sure your bladder isn’t full and is pinging you too early. If that’s the case, you’ll need to work on holding off on peeing for longer intervals to help retrain your bladder to wait to ping you until it really is full and needs to be emptied.
Check yourself! The bladder holds 400-600 mL (~1.5-2.5 cups) of liquid. It keeps a bit of reserve even after you’ve urinated so you’re never completely empty. It’s normal to urinate every 2-4 hours during the day (about 4-6 times/day) and 0-1 times at night. If you’re going more often than that, and you’ve ruled out infection or some other underlying cause, here are some things that can help…
One thing to help the urge to urinate too soon pass is to do some quick flicks. Basically you do some quick pelvic floor muscle squeezes as that will send the signal to your bladder to stop the urine from coming. This can literally take away that feeling that you urgently need to find a bathroom and empty your bladder.
Homework: Practice a few quick flicks where you quickly squeeze your pelvic floor muscles a few times. That way you’ll know what to do and be ready when the next urge comes.
Use the clock. If you’re feeling like you need to pee every 15-20 minutes and know your bladder can’t possibly be full, you can use a timer to make your bladder hold it even just 30 seconds to a minute longer at a time. Over the course of several days, you could increase your wait time between bladder emptying quite a bit. For example, you have a timer ready for 1 minute. So you feel the urge to urinate and start the timer to train your bladder to wait just a bit longer. In a couple of days, you can increase the time to 2 minutes. And just keep upping the increments until you’re bladder is waiting until a reasonable interval between urinating.
If your urge to urinate is triggered by certain events like pulling in the driveway, walking in the front door, turning on water, etc., distractions can really help with the retraining process. So if you pull into your driveway and start to feel the urge, instead of jumping out of your car and running inside to the bathroom, try just sitting and relaxing for a minute. Read the mail or a book. Say a prayer for someone. Just anything that can teach your bladder that coming home doesn’t mean it always has to go to the bathroom right then.
Make a game out of it. You vs. Your Bladder. Try to make retraining your bladder a fun challenge which will help take the stress out of it and help things go more smoothly. Maybe even wear a big pad while you’re extending the time so if you have the occasional miss, it’s no big deal. Just like with a game, get a new guy, and start again to try to get to the next level.
Since the bladder is highly trainable, it may only take about 3 days to notice big changes, which is awesome and will help encourage you to keep going to that next level.
Nutritional & Lifestyle Considerations for Bladder Health
Good bladder habits aren’t just about how often you “go.” Since the bladder is a container for what’s filtered through the kidneys, what you put into your body is going to affect your bladder. So if you put irritants into your bladder, it’s going to be more likely to get irritated which may make you feel the need to urinate more frequently as well.
To keep the bladder healthy, calm, and working well, here are a few things to try…
Keep urine dilute. Many women who struggle with incontinence try to drink less to keep from needing to empty so often. But the reality is, if the urine is super concentrated from not drinking enough, it may keep it even more irritable and feel like you have to go more often. Vicious cycle. The best thing for your bladder is pure, filtered water sipped on throughout the day between meals. Aim for about half you weight in ounces. If you weight 120 lb, drink about 60 oz of water per day. (this isn’t set in stone, it’s just an easy thing to remember. So if you’re more active and/or sweating more, you’ll need more.)
Avoid irritants like alcohol, coffee, smoking, caffeine, spicy foods, chocolate, dairy, processed sugar, artificial sweeteners, and possibly tomatoes and citrus (temporarily). Keep a food diary so you can pinpoint what might be causing or exacerbating the frequent urination. Simply record what you’re eating or drinking every day as well as how often and how much you go to the bathroom. You’ll start to notice a pattern with your habits and how it affects your bladder.
Check your meds. Bladder irritation can be a side effect of medications. Read the inserts and check with your doctor about getting off of the medication (to make sure it’s safe to stop quickly or if you need to slowly reduce it).
Don’t drink too much liquid. While you want to be hydrated, you don’t want to overdo it as your body will just get rid of what it doesn’t need.
Manage stress. Bladder irritation can most definitely be stress-related. Deep breathing, getting outside, getting organized, asking for help, prayer, and meditating on God’s Word are all great ways to put stress into perspective and keep from overwhelm.
Pelvic Floor Role in Urinary Incontinence
While you’re working on relaxation strategies to help manage stress, don’t forget about your pelvic floor. Holding tension in the pelvic floor muscles, especially in the front, can cause a lot of irritation and exacerbate urge incontinence as well - it also play a huge role in stress incontinence. So while you may have heard or read that doing kegel exercises will help with incontinence, if you’re holding too much tension already, this could actually make the problem worse. Check in with your pelvic floor to see if you can completely relax it or if you’re chronically tense. If you are, work on some downtraining - breathing down into your pelvic floor on the inhale, strengthening the pelvic girdle muscles, and postural alignment.
When to Get Help
If you’re suddenly dealing with urge incontinence that wasn’t there before, it might be a good idea to get checked for infection like a UTI to make sure that’s not the culprit.
And if you’ve tried all of these suggestions and aren’t seeing any significant changes, definitely seek out the help of a pelvic floor therapist to help you pinpoint what’s going on and put a plan together to help. Especially in the case of pelvic floor tightness, it can cause a deeper nerve irritation that may take more time and targeted strategies to reduce inflammation and resolve.
But be sure to give all these ideas a shot first and see how it goes. I bet you’ll be pleasantly surprised to see how easy it is to train your bladder (easier than a puppy) and you may just gain a whole new freedom you didn’t know you could have!
Want to see how well your pelvic floor is working? Check out this free printable checklist to find out!
Note: For educational purposes only. Not to take the place of or be taken as medical advice.
*This post may contain affiliate links to some or all of the products listed. While it will not change the cost to you, I may receive compensation if you choose to purchase through my links. Thank you for your support.
