One study found athletes were three times as likely to leak as women who did little or no exercise. But why does this happen – and can you prevent it?
n a wall in a gym in south London, someone has written: “PB with a bit of wee.” Who could have written it? A runner? A woman doing CrossFit who has been jumping rope? A powerlifter? Evidence shows that all these activities can trigger higher rates of urinary incontinence in women than other activities.
I don’t complain about it, but I have it. I can no longer run downhill without my bladder leaking. Trampolining is out of the question without an incontinence pad. And, like many post-menopausal women who discover far too late that their bones have the density of an 80-year-old’s, I have taken up weightlifting. It’s not just the post-menopausal tribe who are lifting, though: nearly half the members of USA Weightlifting are now women.
Inside the powerlifting and weightlifting community, Westray says, no one bats an eyelid. But when she shows her friends videos of her peeing while lifting, they tell her to go to the doctor. Cristina Rigden, 45, is a mother of five and a powerlifter from Herne Bay in Kent. When she started to leak while lifting, she duly approached her GP. “They referred me to a bed-wetting clinic. But I wasn’t wetting the bed,” she says.
What is disgusting, says Alter, isn’t having urinary incontinence, but the reaction to it. There is no need for stigma. On the other hand she is emphatic that “it is common, but not normal”. I guess she would say that, as she is in the business of rehab and helping women who do have a problem. But the POGP says something similar. “It should not be accepted as a ‘price to pay’, but should be a trigger for a women to seek specialist help from a pelvic-health physiotherapist.
In a standing lift, there are techniques to aid a lifter to support the phenomenal weight. One is a Valsalva manoeuvre, which involves breathing in and pushing out the abdomen. Another is the belt, which increases the intra-abdominal pressure and braces the core. But maybe for women the belt is pressing in the wrong place. Maybe the Valsalva manoeuvre is adding to the pressure on the bladder.
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