The Exploding Soda Can: Stress Urinary Incontinence

**I must preface this with urinary leakage may be COMMON, but is not NORMAL. Please contact a Pelvic Floor PT for help if you experience leakage!!**

Before I became a pelvic floor physical therapist, I thought that stress urinary incontinence was due to emotional, psychological stress. After taking Pelvic Floor 1, I realized how sadly mistaken I was. 

So for the other folks who don’t know what stress urinary incontinence, here we go!

The definition: urinary leakage related to a stress to the system such as physical movement or activity. So a person is experiencing stress urinary incontinence if they cough, sneeze, laugh, yell, jump, run, etc and leak urine!

Why does this happen?

Our pelvic floor is the basement of a system called our abdominal canister. It coordinates with our back, our belly muscles, our diaphragm and rib cage. This system works together in a pressurised system, described as Mary Massery as a “Soda Pop Model.” This is the idea that if the soda can is intact, pressure on it from any aspect does not drastically affect it. Pop the top, and pressure on the can can cause all sorts of changes. 

In an ideal world, these all work together, transferring forces like coughs, sneezes and jumps easily without dysfunction or leakage. But time, age, pregnancy, weight gain and loss, sedentary lifestyle, abdominal surgery and more can cause a disruption to this system.

Since the pelvic floor is the basement, where are leaks likely to happen? You’re hopefully not leaking out your back, belly or diaphragm, so gravity forces the pressure down into your pelvic floor, creating increased force on the bladder that the pelvic floor muscle fail to counteract. 

So if you’re experiencing urinary leakage related to activity or functional movements, it may be stress urinary incontinence. Pelvic Floor Physical Therapy can really help to improve this with exercise, postural re-education, small lifestyle changes and coordination exercises for your abdominal canister. 

Contact me at practicallyperfectPT@gmail.com if you’d like to know if I can help with your urinary leakage!

Perfectly yours,

Miss Mora