What are pelvic floor exercises? (2024)

Pelvic floorexercises strengthen the muscles around your bladder, bottom, and vagin* or penis.

Strengthening your pelvic floor musclescan help urinary incontinence, treatpelvic organ prolapse, and make sex better too.

Everyone can benefit from doingpelvic floor exercises.

Find your pelvic floor muscles

You can feel your pelvic floor muscles if you try to imagine stopping yourself peeing and farting.

It's not recommended that you regularly stop the flow of pee midstreamas it can be harmful to your bladder.

Pelvic floor exercises

To strengthen your pelvic floor muscles, squeeze the muscles up to 10 times while standing, sitting or lying down.

Do not hold your breath or tighten your stomach, bottom or thigh muscles at the same time.

When you get used to doing pelvic floor exercises, you can try holding each squeeze for one second. Eventually you can try a set of 10 fast squeezes, followed by a set where you hold each squeeze.

Be careful not to overdo it, and always have a rest between sets of squeezes. It's best not to do a set of these exercises more than 6 times a day.

After a few months, you should start to notice results.You should keep doing the exercises, even when you notice they're starting to work.

Pregnancy and pelvic floor exercises

If you're pregnant or planning to get pregnant, you can start doing pelvic floor exercises immediately.

The exercises will loweryour chance of experiencing incontinence after having your baby.

Find out more about exercise in pregnancy, including pelvic floor exercises.

How pelvic floor exercises canhelp with sex

Strong pelvic floor muscles can also mean increased sensitivity during sex and stronger org*sms.

Strengthening and training the pelvic floor muscles can also help to reduce the symptoms oferectile dysfunction.

Further information

• Exercise in pregnancy
• Pelvic organ prolapse
• Urinary incontinence