Decrease Leaking Without Kegels

If you are someone who is struggling with leaking while you are running, I want to give you a few ideas of how you can decrease that leaking without doing any pelvic floor contraction or strength work.

So when we run, our foot hits the ground, and we’re going to absorb that impact up off the ground. If we can decrease the amount of impact coming up off the ground, it’s less work for our pelvic floor to do. And it’s less likely that you will leak. So here are a few different ways you can decrease that impact.

One way is simply just increasing your cadence. Cadence is how many times your feet are hitting the ground. So say your cadence is 160 steps per minute. If you can increase that cadence, 5% orr maybe 10% at the max, what that’s going to do is that turnover is going to be quicker, your foot is going to land more underneath your body, and you’re going to decrease the impact coming up off the ground.

So increasing cadence is one way. Another way is if you want to play with a gentle forward lean while you’re running. So instead of landing where you’re shifted back a little bit, you can gently just shift yourself forward. It doesn’t have to be a really big lean, but just gently leaning forward. That can lessen the impact that your pelvic floor has to deal with.

Another way that you can decrease your leaking are lower extremity strength like squats, lunges, calf raises. Anything that you can do to get stronger through your hips, knees and ankles. Those muscles are going to do more work for you and that means less work for your pelvic floor.

The last thing that you can work on is balance. Work on single leg stability and doing exercises on one leg. Running is a single leg activity. If you can get stronger, have better control on one leg it can help your leaking as well.

So those are a bunch of different ideas that you can incorporate in to try to help with your leaking instead of just doing pelvic floor work.