Your Secret Support - and how to improve your sex life!

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We use it every day as soon as we get out of bed, and in fact many people use it when they're asleep too. It's one of the most neglected muscles in our body but when it fails to do it's job properly it can make our lives a misery!

I'm talking about the Pelvic Floor.

The pelvic floor is a sheet of muscles that support all the contents of our pelvis: which means -

• The bladder
• The rectum and it's faecal contents
• and in women, the uterus and ovaries too

When the pelvic floor lets you down then controlling your urine can be a challenge when coughing, sneezing, straining or even just standing up! For those with loose bowel motions, a weak pelvic floor means that soiling your pants can be an embarrassing problem which may lead to social isolation as well. And when the bottom literally falls out of your pelvic floor, your uterus will often fall out too leading to a utero-vaginal prolapse!

Most of these condition are preventable by good personal care. For most people this means a lifelong approach to daily pelvic floor exercises and being aware of:

• Avoiding constipation and/or straining with a bowel motion
• Avoiding persistent heavy lifting
• Treating chronic coughs and straining
• Watching your weight and losing it if you're too heavy

So how can I improve the strength of my pelvic floor?

The first thing to do is to identify which muscles they are. After all, if you haven't used them for decades it's highly unlikely you know where they are in the first place! My suggestion is that the next time you go to the toilet to pass urine, try to stop mid-stream. When you do that, you're using your pelvic floor muscles and they are th emuscles you need to focus on.

Once you've identified them, it's time to exercise them. That's simple:

Squeeze and hold for 5 seconds and then relax - don't forget to include the muscles around your back passage too! Repeat for 5 slow squeezes and try to repeat three or four times a day. It's that simple and you can literally do these exercises anywhere and no-one will know what you're doing!

If you keep this up then after a few weeks you'll be aware that control of your urine will improve. And for ladies, as your pelvic floor muscles get stronger you'll be able to squeeze your vagina as well which brings me to the bit about your sex life .....