Bladder symptoms such as urinary incontinence (accidentally leaking urine or pee) and increased urinary frequency can be caused by a variety of issues such as injury, trauma, age, and medical conditions. Medications, pessaries, and surgery can sometimes be helpful or necessary. Sometimes medications can be avoided by doing exercises to train your bladder to hold urine better. You can also avoid urinating at night by avoiding water, alcohol, and tea in the evenings.

Timed voids

“Timed voids” is a practice of going to urinate on schedule, in order to slowly teach your bladder to hold urine for longer. You can start by setting an alarm and make yourself go urinate every 30 minutes, regardless if you need to urinate or not. If you are able to keep your urine for 30 minutes consistently, then you can slowly increase the time between visits to the washroom. You might want to increase it to 45 minutes, then 1 hour, then 1.5 hours, and so on. You want to slowly increase the periods between timed voids until you can hold in urine for at least 3-4 hours between visits to the bathroom.

Interrupted voids

“Interrupted voids” are when you stop your flow of urine half-way. To do this, when you urinate, let out urine for only 2-3 seconds at a time. Pay attention to the muscles that you feel when you try to stop your urine from flowing. These are your pelvic floor muscles. Doing this exercise every time you pee can help build up your pelvic floor muscles to hold urine better and prevent urine from leaking.

Pelvic Floor Exercises or Kegal Exercises

Pelvic floor exercises can build up the muscles that help to keep urine from leaking (see “Interrupted Voids” above about how to identify these muscles). When you are at rest, reading, or watching TV, you can work-out your pelvic floor muscles by contracting and relaxing your pelvic floor muscles. Doing these exercises regularly can strengthen the muscles to hold urine better and prevent urine from leaking.