Expecting Better by Emily Oster

Expecting Better by Emily Oster

Author:Emily Oster [Oster, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2013-08-20T04:00:00+00:00


Kegels

Kegels get a lot of play in the world of pregnancy. In medical terms, these are called pelvic floor exercises. Here’s how to find your pelvic muscles if you haven’t already. Go pee (shouldn’t be too hard, given that you are pregnant). Squeeze your muscles to stop midstream. Feel that? Those are your pelvic floor muscles (men have these, too; same procedure to find them). Kegels are nothing more than exercises where you repeatedly squeeze those muscles to strengthen them.

Women’s magazines sometimes recommend you work on these muscles even when not pregnant, so that you can use them during sex. Indeed, this is a common “treatment” for female sexual dysfunction (i.e., inability to orgasm), although hard empirical evidence on its effectiveness is lacking.5 However, it does turn out that strengthening these muscles during pregnancy has several benefits.

Nearly all women experience some urinary incontinence during late pregnancy or after delivery—most commonly when sneezing or coughing. Some women experience more severe forms—they pee when laughing, during strenuous exercise, etc.—and this can continue for significant periods—years, even—postpartum. Kegels are extremely good for preventing this.

There are many studies of this, but let’s take one typical one, which was run in Taiwan and published in 2011.6 It was a randomized trial: 300 women were recruited; 150 were assigned to do Kegel exercises and the other 150 were left to their own devices. The particular exercise was fairly standard: twice a day, women did 3 sets of 8 Kegels, where they tightened and held for 6 seconds, with 2-minute breaks between each set. This is not that much; it amounts to maybe 15 or 20 minutes a day total.

Women in this study were asked to complete a 6-item questionnaire at several points during their pregnancy and right after. The questions focused on urinary control: e.g., how often do you pee, and do you experience urine leakage at various times. Each question was worth 1 point, with a maximum score of 6, which would indicate very bad urinary symptoms. Lower scores were better. The graph below shows scores on this questionnaire for women in the Kegels group and those in the control group at various points during their pregnancies.

Kegels and Urinary Incontinence



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