Postpartum:  What Changed, Your Pelvic Floor and How to Recover.

Somewhere between the diaper changes and the night feeds, you noticed something about your own body that nobody had warned you about. Maybe you leaked when you sneezed. Maybe things feel different in a way you can’t quite put into words. Maybe sex hurt, or just didn’t feel like it used to, and you haven’t said that out loud to anybody.

Almost all of the attention during pregnancy goes to the baby, and that doesn’t stop the day you give birth. You had one appointment at six weeks, it took about ten minutes, and nobody asked you much about any of this. Then you were sent back into the rest of your life to work out on your own what was normal.

Here’s the part that would have been useful to know. Some of what you’re noticing will settle as you heal. Some of it won’t, and can carry on for years if nothing is done about it. The difference between those two matters a great deal, and almost nobody explains which is which.

That’s what this page is for. We’ll go through what pregnancy and birth actually do to the pelvic floor, why it happens whether you delivered vaginally or by cesarean, what tends to improve on its own, and what responds to a bit of help. We’ll also be straight with you about what doesn’t work, because there’s plenty of that around too.

You don’t need to read it in one sitting. It’ll be here at 3am when you are.

On This Page:

Postpartum Changes: What You Might Be Noticing

The most common change women see after their babies is leaking. A sneeze, a cough, a laugh that catches you off guard. Lifting the car seat. Running for something you weren’t going to catch anyway. For some women it shows up as urgency instead, a sudden need to go that arrives with no warning, or simply going far more often than you used to, including at night when you’re finally getting a decent stretch of sleep.

Some women notice a heaviness or pressure low in the pelvis. It tends to be worse by the end of the day and better in the morning, which is a clue rather than a coincidence. Being upright and carrying a baby around all day puts a load on muscles that are still recovering.

Things may also just feel different. Soreness that’s taking longer to fade than you expected. Tampons that don’t sit the way they did. Dryness, which is very common if you’re breastfeeding. Sex that’s uncomfortable, or that feels different enough to be unsettling even when it doesn’t actually hurt. Less interest in it than you used to have, which brings its own quiet worry.

Less often, there are changes in bowel control, or a feeling that you can’t fully empty. And a lot of women find their middle feels weak in a way that sit-ups don’t fix, sometimes with a gap down the center of the abdomen you can feel with your fingers.

Two things worth saying plainly here.

All of this happens after a cesarean too. Pregnancy puts nine months of load on the pelvic floor on its own, and that happens whichever way your baby arrived. If you’ve been told your pelvic floor should be fine because you had a C-section, that isn’t quite right.

And none of it runs to a schedule. Some women notice changes straight away. Others feel fine for months and then find something is different at eight months, or a year, or after a second baby. Showing up late doesn’t mean it’s unrelated, and it doesn’t mean you’ve missed your chance to do something about it.



Why This Happens, and Why It Isn’t Your Fault


Your pelvic floor is a sling of muscle running from your pubic bone to your tailbone, holding up your bladder, bowel and uterus. For nine months it carried a steadily increasing weight while pregnancy hormones softened the tissue and joints around it to make room. By the end it was doing a much harder job than it had ever done, around the clock, with no break.

Then there was the birth. During a vaginal delivery those muscles and the tissue around them stretch a long way to let your baby through. That is what they are built to do, and most of the time they recover a good deal of it. Sometimes they don’t recover all of it, and that isn’t a failure on anybody’s part.

What mostly decides how much changes is nothing you chose. How long the pushing stage went on. Whether forceps or a vacuum were needed. The size and position of your baby. Whether you tore, and how badly. How many babies you’ve had. The collagen you were born with. Not one of those was a decision.

Which means the things women tend to blame themselves for are rarely the reason. Not doing your kegels during pregnancy. Going back to exercise before somebody said you could. Lifting the toddler when you’d been told not to. Pushing too hard, or not hard enough. If you’ve been turning any of those over at 4am, you can put them down.

If something went wrong here, it isn’t anything you did. It’s that nobody prepared you. You probably had a dozen conversations about car seats and sleep schedules and not one about the muscles that were about to do the hardest work of the whole thing.

The emotional burden of pregnancy

There’s a part of this that doesn’t come up at any appointment, and for a lot of women it’s the part doing the most damage.You might not quite recognize your own body. You might feel like something is wrong with you specifically, because every other mother you know seems to have managed fine. You might be avoiding sex, and not because it hurts, but because you don’t want to be looked at, or because you’re worried about what you will or won’t feel.

Most women say nothing about any of it. Not to their partner, not to their doctor, not in the group chat where everyone compares sleep and feeding. Leaking doesn’t come up there. Neither does sex that has started to hurt, or a body that feels like it belongs to somebody else.

There’s often guilt stacked on top. You have a healthy baby and you know exactly how lucky that is, so being upset about your own body can feel ungrateful. That keeps a lot of women quiet far longer than the symptoms themselves would.

None of that is an overreaction. Your body changed in ways nobody warned you about, you are more tired than you have ever been, and the entire world is asking how the baby is sleeping rather than how you are. Feeling low about it is a reasonable response to a genuinely hard situation, not a character flaw.

If the low feeling is bigger than your body, if most days are heavy, if you don’t feel like yourself in a way that goes past leaking and soreness, please tell someone. Postpartum depression and anxiety are common and they respond well to treatment. Your doctor has heard it many times before and will not think any less of you for saying it out loud.

After your Six Week Checkup

Most women get one appointment around six weeks after birth, and a lot of what happens next depends on what you took away from it.

It usually runs about ten minutes. Your provider checks that your uterus has gone back to size, looks at any stitches or your incision, asks about bleeding and about how you’re coping, and clears you for exercise and sex. What it almost never includes is anyone checking how your pelvic floor muscles are actually working.

So being cleared means something narrower than it sounds. It means it’s safe to go back to normal activity. It does not mean somebody examined your pelvic floor and found it recovered, because in most practices nobody looks.

On timing, there are really two answers. Gentle pelvic floor exercises can often begin quite early, sometimes within days of birth, because you’re only asking the muscle to engage. Anything that goes inside you is different, and that waits until after your six week check and until your provider confirms the tissue has healed. If you had significant tearing, an episiotomy, or a cesarean, give it longer and ask the question directly rather than guessing.

If you’re reading this at eight months, or two years, or after your third baby, you haven’t missed your window. Muscle responds to training whenever you start. Six weeks is about when it’s safe to begin, not a door that closes behind you.

After your Six Week Checkup

Some of it will. Soreness, swelling and the early tenderness mostly settle over the first weeks and months as the tissue heals. Plenty of women find their bladder control improves a good deal over the first three months without doing anything in particular.

After that, the picture changes, and there’s solid research on exactly this. A study followed nearly four thousand women for twelve years after childbirth. Of the women who were still leaking at three months postpartum, 76% were still leaking twelve years later. Only about one in seven went on to have no further trouble at all.¹

That isn’t a reason to panic. It’s a reason to stop waiting. Three months appears to be roughly where “it’ll sort itself out” stops being true, and past that point symptoms tend to stay unless something is done about them.

The same study found something else worth knowing. A third of the women who were completely dry at three months were leaking by six years. So this isn’t only about recovering from a birth. Pelvic floor muscle weakens over the years in most women, and pregnancy and birth give that process a running start.

The useful part in all of this is that we’re talking about muscle, and muscle responds to training at any age and at any distance from the delivery. What helps a woman six months postpartum is the same as what helps one sixteen years on. Nothing about this has a deadline.

What Doesn’t Help

Very little of this is a scam. It’s mostly things that get recommended for postpartum recovery without anyone being clear about what they actually do.

Waiting. The most common approach and the one with the worst track record. It’s also the most understandable, because you were told it takes time and you have roughly no spare capacity for anything else right now. But as the research above shows, past about three months, waiting stops being a plan.

Belly wraps and binders. These are genuinely useful for comfort in the early days, especially after a cesarean, and nobody should feel silly for wearing one. What they don’t do is strengthen anything. They hold your abdomen in from the outside, which is a different thing from your muscles doing the work. Worn very tight, they can even push downward pressure onto a pelvic floor that’s already struggling.

Crunches, planks, and getting back to running early. The instinct to go hard at your core makes complete sense, and it’s what most fitness advice points you toward. The problem is that all of those increase pressure downward through your abdomen, onto exactly the muscles you’re trying to help. If you’re leaking during a workout, that’s your body telling you the load is more than the floor can currently handle, and pushing through it doesn’t build strength.

Kegels nobody has ever checked. Pelvic floor exercises genuinely work. The catch is in doing them right. When researchers have actually tested it, a large share of women following written or spoken instructions weren’t contracting the correct muscles, and some were pushing down instead of lifting, which is worse than doing nothing at all. If you’ve been doing kegels for months with no change, this is the most likely reason, and it isn’t because you weren’t trying hard enough.

Vaginal weights and jade eggs. Heavily marketed, and the idea sounds logical. In practice, if your pelvic floor is weak enough to need help, holding a weight is difficult, and if it’s too tight rather than too weak, adding resistance is the opposite of what you need. There’s little good evidence behind them for postpartum recovery.

What Actually Helps

There’s more available here than most women are told about, and some of it costs nothing. What follows runs roughly from simplest to most involved.

Pelvic floor muscle training.  This is the foundation, and everything else on this list either supports it or works alongside it. Training the muscle directly has the best evidence of anything available for postpartum bladder control, and it’s free, private, and available to you tonight.

The only thing that matters is doing it correctly. A proper contraction is a lift and a squeeze inward and upward, not a push down and not a clench of your buttocks or thighs. If you can, have someone confirm you’ve got it once. That single check is often the difference between months of effort and months of results.

Pelvic floor physiotherapy. If you can get it, get it. A pelvic floor physiotherapist assesses what’s actually happening, tells you whether your muscles are weak or too tight or simply uncoordinated, and builds a plan for your situation rather than a generic one. They’ll also look at your breathing, your scar if you have one, and how you’re lifting and carrying all day, because all of it connects.

Worth knowing: in France, pelvic floor rehabilitation is funded as standard care for every woman after birth. In North America it’s something you have to find, pay for, and often wait months to access. That difference isn’t about the medicine. The treatment works equally well on both sides of the Atlantic.The barriers here are real. Well over a hundred dollars a session in most places, frequently several sessions, often not covered. Waitlists that run months. And the assessment is internal, which some women won’t want, especially soon after a difficult birth. That’s a reasonable thing to decline.

Training with a device.  This is where YoniFlex sits, and it’s worth being clear about what it does and doesn’t solve.

What it solves is the technique problem and the time problem. Electrical muscle stimulation contracts the muscle for you, so whether you’ve correctly found the right one stops mattering. There’s no appointment, no drive, no waitlist, and no childcare to arrange. You can do it on the sofa in twenty minutes while the baby naps, which for a lot of women is the actual difference between doing something and doing nothing.

What it doesn’t solve is assessment. A device can’t tell you if your real problem is a pelvic floor that’s too tight rather than too weak, which does happen after a difficult birth, and in that case strengthening is the wrong treatment. It’s also money up front, and it asks for consistency over months, same as everything else here.

Lubricants and vaginal moisturizers.  Simple, cheap, and they work immediately, which is rare on this list. If you’re breastfeeding and things feel dry or uncomfortable, this is the first thing to try rather than the last. A moisturizer used regularly does a different job than a lubricant used during sex, and plenty of women benefit from both.

Vaginal estrogen. If the dryness is significant and lubricants aren’t enough, this is worth raising with your provider. Low-dose vaginal estrogen improves the quality of the tissue itself rather than just coating it. It’s a prescription, it’s different from systemic hormone therapy, and it can be used while breastfeeding, though that’s a conversation to have with your own provider rather than a website.

How you breathe and how you liftYou’ll be lifting a car seat, a stroller and a growing baby many times a day for the next couple of years, so this one compounds. Breathe out on the effort rather than holding your breath and bearing down. Keep the load close to your body. None of it strengthens anything on its own, but it stops you working against the rest of this all day long.

If You Had a Cesarean

A lot of women who deliver by cesarean are told, or quietly assume, that their pelvic floor was spared. That’s partly true and mostly not.

A cesarean does lower the risk of pelvic floor problems compared with a vaginal delivery, particularly the more serious ones, and it’s fair to say so. What it doesn’t do is remove the risk. Your pelvic floor carried nine months of steadily increasing weight before the delivery, with pregnancy hormones softening the tissue around it the whole time. All of that happened regardless of how your baby eventually arrived.

Which is why plenty of women who had a cesarean still leak, still feel heaviness, or still have a middle that feels weak in a way nothing seems to fix. If that’s you and somebody has told you it shouldn’t be happening, they’re mistaken, and you aren’t imagining it.

You also have something a vaginal birth doesn’t involve, which is recovery from major abdominal surgery. The incision needs real time. The scar can stay tender, tight or oddly numb for months. The muscles around it often take longer to come back online than anyone warns you about, and that can feel like weakness when it’s actually a signal that isn’t getting through properly yet. Once you’re fully healed, scar massage is something a pelvic floor physiotherapist can teach you in one visit, and it tends to help more than you’d expect.

On timing, give yourself longer than the standard six weeks before anything internal, and ask your provider directly rather than assuming the usual answer applies to you.

Breastfeeding and Dryness

While you’re breastfeeding, your body keeps estrogen low. That’s normal and it’s doing a job. One of the side effects is that the tissue in and around the vagina gets thinner and drier than it used to be, sometimes considerably.

Which means sex can be uncomfortable, or outright painful, in a way it never was before. It can happen even when you feel ready and want to, which is confusing and tends to make women assume something is wrong with them. Some also notice their interest has dropped off, and low estrogen contributes to that too, alongside the exhaustion and the general strangeness of the whole period.

The important thing here is that this is a hormonal state, not damage. When breastfeeding winds down and your cycle returns, estrogen rises again and the tissue recovers. A lot of women quietly decide that sex is permanently different now, when the main thing driving it is temporary.

In the meantime, a good lubricant makes an immediate difference, and a vaginal moisturizer used a few times a week does a different and longer-lasting job. Plenty of women use both. If neither is enough, low-dose vaginal estrogen is worth raising with your provider, and it can generally be used while nursing.

One thing worth saying plainly. Pain during sex isn’t something to push through and hope it eases. Pain teaches the pelvic floor to tense up protectively, and a tense floor makes the next time harder rather than easier. That cycle is common, it’s treatable, and it’s a good reason to mention it to someone sooner rather than later.

When to Talk to Someone

Most of what’s on this page can be worked on at home, in your own time. A few things can’t, and it’s worth knowing which is which.

Don’t wait on these. If you have any of the following, contact your provider today or go to an emergency room:

Heavy bleeding, soaking through a pad in an hour or less
A severe headache that won’t shift, or changes in your vision
Chest pain or trouble breathing
A feverSevere abdominal pain
Pain, redness or swelling in one leg
An incision or tear that’s getting more painful, red, or starting to smell

Those can be signs of things that are very treatable when caught early and serious when they aren’t. Nobody will think you overreacted.

And one more, which belongs on the same list. If you’re having thoughts of harming yourself or your baby, tell someone today. Your provider, a partner, a friend, or Postpartum Support International on 1-800-944-4773. This happens to more women than anyone admits out loud, it responds well to treatment, and saying it is not going to cost you your baby. That fear keeps women silent for months and it shouldn’t.

Worth booking an appointment for, without any urgency:
Leaking that’s still there past three months
Any loss of bowel control, or difficulty controlling wind
A feeling of bulging or something sitting low in the vagina
Pelvic pain, or pain during sex, that isn’t settling
Difficulty emptying your bladder fully
A scar that stays painful, tight or numb months later
Anything that’s getting worse rather than better

None of those mean something is badly wrong. They mean the explanation might not be the one you’ve landed on, and you deserve a better answer than a website can give you.

Who to see. Your family doctor or OB can examine you and refer you onward. A pelvic floor physiotherapist assesses the muscles themselves, which is a different and often more useful examination, and in many places you can book directly without a referral. A urogynecologist is the specialist if things turn out to be more involved.

You don’t have to wait until something is bad enough to justify the appointment. That bar is set far too high by most of us, and it’s why so many women spend years managing something that had a straightforward answer.

Frequently Asked Questions:

YoniFlex has been supporting women’s pelvic floor health for over six years, and we have received hundreds of questions from people just like you. Here are answers to the most common questions about vagianl tightening we receive:

How long does postpartum recovery actually take?

There isn’t one answer, and the women who get handed “six weeks” are being badly served by that number.

Six weeks is roughly how long tissue takes to heal. Most of the more visible recovery, your energy returning, bleeding stopping, your uterus going back to size, happens across the first three to six months. If you’re breastfeeding, your hormones won’t fully settle until some time after you stop, which can be a year or more, and that affects dryness and sometimes how you feel generally.

The pelvic floor is different again, because it’s muscle. Muscle doesn’t have a recovery date, it has a current condition that changes depending on what you do with it. That sounds frustrating, but it’s the good news in this answer. It means there’s no clock running out on you.

The one thing worth resisting is comparison. Two women with similar pregnancies and similar births can have completely different experiences, and the mother at playgroup who seems entirely fine may well be managing something she hasn’t mentioned to a soul.

Is it normal to still be leaking at a year?

Common, yes. Very. Most of the women it’s happening to have told nobody, which is exactly why it feels like it’s only you.

But normal does not mean it is something you are suppposed to accept.

The honest part is that at a year, it probably isn’t going to clear up on its own.

The research further up this page found that women still leaking at three months were overwhelmingly likely to still be leaking twelve years later. By a year, waiting has already had a fair run at it.

That isn’t discouraging news, though it feel land that way. The same muscle that responds to training at three months responds just as well at one year, at five years, and at twenty. Nothing is final. It just means waiting isn’t the thing that’s going to shift it.

Does childbirth change things permanently?

For some women, yes, but less often than the fear suggests, and recovery runs longer than most people expect. The first year after a birth does most of the work, and improvement can keep going beyond that with training. The births most likely to leave lasting change are the ones involving a long pushing stage, a large baby, forceps or vacuum, significant tearing, or several deliveries close together.

There's also a version almost nobody discusses. In a minority of vaginal births, the pelvic floor muscle tears away from the bone it attaches to. It happens more often than women realize, it usually goes undiagnosed, and it's one reason some women do everything right and still don't get back to where they were. Even then, training what remains helps, because strength in the rest of the muscle still produces more support than no strength at all. If you've done consistent work for several months and have nothing to show for it, that's a reason to get assessed rather than to decide you've failed at it.

Did childbirth permanently change my body?

Some of it, yes. Your ribcage may have widened. Your feet might be half a size bigger and stay that way. There may be a scar, or stretch marks, or a softness through the middle that never entirely goes. Anyone promising you’ll be exactly as you were isn’t being straight with you.

Changed is not the same word as damaged, though, and that difference is where most of the worry actually sits. Women asking this question are rarely thinking about shoe size. They’re asking whether the leaking is permanent, whether sex will always feel like this, whether the heaviness is simply how they live now.

Those are a different category, because they’re about how muscle and tissue function rather than how your frame is shaped. Function responds to training. A pelvic floor that has weakened can get stronger at any point, and the things that improve when it does are precisely the things women are most afraid are permanent.

It helps to separate the two in your own head. The parts that genuinely won’t change back are mostly cosmetic, and mostly nobody’s business but yours. The parts that are actually affecting your daily life are the ones most likely to improve.

Can I exercise if I’m leaking?

In most cases yes, though it’s worth getting the go-ahead from your doctor or a pelvic floor physiotherapist first, particularly in the first year or if you had a difficult birth. Once you’ve been cleared, there’s no reason to stop exercising. Leaking during a workout is telling you something straightforward: the load is more than your pelvic floor can currently handle.

Adjust rather than stop. Walking or cycling instead of running for a while, lighter weights, breathing out on the effort rather than holding your breath. As the muscle strengthens, that threshold tends to move and most women get back to what they were doing before. Wearing a pad and carrying on unchanged tends not to improve on its own.

Why does sex still hurt?

Sex may continue to hurt due to several factors.  If you’re breastfeeding, low estrogen leaves the tissue thinner and drier than it used to be. If you tore or had an episiotomy, scar tissue can stay tight or tender for a long while afterward. In the first several months, healing may simply not be finished yet.

The cause women are least often told about is muscle guarding. Once sex has hurt a few times, the pelvic floor begins tensing in anticipation, which makes the next attempt more difficult, which reinforces the pattern. By that stage the original cause may have resolved entirely and the tension is doing all the work. That responds well to treatment, usually with a pelvic floor physiotherapist, and it’s the main reason not to keep pushing through and hoping it eases. Pain during sex that isn’t settling deserves an appointment rather than patience.

Is it normal to not want sex?

Yes not wanting sex is very common. Desire after a baby gets hit from several directions at once. Breastfeeding keeps estrogen low, which dampens libido directly. You’re more tired than you have ever been in your life. You’ve been held, fed from and climbed on all day, and by evening a lot of women simply don’t want to be touched by anybody else. If sex has been uncomfortable recently, your body will be quietly bracing against it too.

There is nothing wrong with you, and this is not permanent. For most women it improves as sleep improves, feeding changes and hormones settle. What may last longer is the silence around it, particularly when one partner’s interest has come back and the other’s hasn’t, and neither of them wants to be the one to mention it.

Good communicationwith your partner is very important, without guilt or shame.  This is a totally normal part of the process and nothing to be embarrassed about.

Will having another baby undo the progress?

Another pregnancy and birth will put your pelvic floor through it again, and there’s no sense pretending otherwise. What it won’t do is take you back to where you started. Muscle you’ve built doesn’t vanish because you’re pregnant again, any more than general fitness does. You go into it stronger, and women who go in stronger tend to come through it better.

Pelvic floor training during pregnancy has been shown to reduce the chance of leaking afterward, so what you do now isn’t only for now, it’s preparation for next time. Each pregnancy does add to the lifetime load on those muscles, which is worth knowing while you’re planning your family. Arriving at your next birth with a strong pelvic floor is one of the few parts of the whole experience you can actually influence.

Should I have a cesarean next time to protect my pelvic floor?

A cesarean is associated with lower rates of pelvic floor problems than a vaginal birth, so the premise isn’t wrong. It isn’t protection, though. Pregnancy itself puts nine months of load on the pelvic floor regardless of how the baby is delivered, and women who have only ever had cesareans still experience leaking and heaviness. The reduction is real but partial.

A cesarean is also major abdominal surgery, with a longer recovery, and the risks build with each one you have. That’s why it isn’t generally recommended on pelvic floor grounds alone. Where the conversation genuinely changes is if you had a severe tear last time, or ongoing trouble with bowel control, because the chance of that recurring is something obstetricians take seriously and will discuss with you properly.

This is a decision for you and your obstetrician, with your own history in front of you rather than a general rule. It’s worth going into that appointment with your specific concerns written down, including anything from your last birth that still hasn’t fully settled, instead of asking the question in the abstract.

My youngest is five. Is it too late?

It is NEVER too late to start exercising your pelvic floor muscles. 

Pelvic floor muscle responds to training the way any other muscle does, which means it responds at five years postpartum, at fifteen, and well after menopause. Plenty of women start this work when their children are grown and see real results. There’s no window that quietly closed while you weren’t looking.

The confusion usually comes from the timelines attached to postpartum care. Six weeks is about when it’s safe to begin. Three months is roughly when symptoms stop resolving on their own. Neither has anything to do with when training stops working. What starting earlier would have bought you is fewer years spent managing it, not a better result at the end. Those five years weren’t wasted. Nobody told you there was anything to do.

Is YoniFlex the same as kegels?

It is effectively an automatic perfect kegel exercise. A kegel is a contraction you produce yourself, which means it only works if you've found the right muscle and you're lifting rather than pushing down. YoniFlex produces the contraction electrically, so the muscle fires whether or not you could have located it, and it fires the same way in every session.

The research puts electrical stimulation and correctly performed pelvic floor training in roughly the same place, so this isn't a claim that one is stronger than the other. The difference is certainty, and it matters because a large share of women don't perform kegels correctly without someone checking. You can also do both. Plenty of women use the device to learn what a proper contraction feels like, then do them unaided as well.

What is YoniFlex?

If you've never come across it, here's the plain version.

YoniFlex is an FDA approved11 pelvic floor trainer you use at home. What arrives is a small handheld control unit with a color screen, built in batteries, and a probe that connects to it by a thin cable. The probe goes in much like a tampon.

What it does is electrical muscle stimulation, usually shortened to EMS. It's the same technology a physiotherapy clinic uses, in a unit you own rather than one you book time on. A gentle electrical current tells your pelvic floor muscles to contract, then lets them release, then does it again. You aren't doing the contracting. The device is, and that is the entire point of it.

A session looks like this. Connect the probe, add a little lubricant, insert it, choose a program, and turn the strength up until you can comfortably feel it working. Then sit down for about twenty minutes while it does the rest. Read, watch something, close your eyes. Depending on which program you're running, you'll get up to 120 contractions in that time, each one held and released at the right pace, and every one of them in the right muscle.

There are nine programs on YoniFlex, because different problems need different work. We have a program designed specifically for both stress incontinence, and urge incontinence. Some programs run at a slower frequency to build endurance in the muscles that hold you up all day. Others run faster, training the quick reflex that catches a leak when you cough or sneeze. Included with your YoniFlex is a quick start guide showing you all of the programs and what they are designed to support. YoniFlex is cleared by the FDA for stress incontinence and urge incontinence7.

Additional Resources

You have made it all the way down to the bottom of the page.  I'm proud of you that was a lot of reading!

We can't leave you without first discussing a few highly recommended online resources to help you on your journey.

FDA Warns Against Use of Energy-Based Devices to Perform Vaginal "Rejuvenation"
The FDA's own safety communication on laser and radiofrequency treatments marketed for tightening.
fda.gov

PT Locator, Academy of Pelvic Health Physical Therapy
Search for a pelvic floor physical therapist near you.
aptapelvichealth.org/ptlocator

Pelvic Support Problems, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
ACOG's patient page on the pelvic floor and what happens when it weakens.
acog.org

Genitourinary Syndrome of Menopause, The Menopause Society
A free patient handout covering dryness, thinning tissue and the treatment options.
menopause.org

Your Sexual Health, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
ACOG's patient page on sexual function, covering more of the causes than this page can.
acog.org

Reach out and Chat

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out to us. We can be reached at Support@YoniFlex.com, or by filling out our online form.  


Until next time,

Rae,
President,
YoniFlex.com

WHEN YOU'RE READY

YoniFlex is ready for you.

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References

1. Hendrix SL et al. Pelvic organ prolapse in the Women's Health Initiative: gravity and gravidity. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 2002. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12066091
Nygaard I et al. Prevalence of symptomatic pelvic floor disorders in US women. JAMA, 2008. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18799443

2. Staging follows the POP-Q system (Pelvic Organ Prolapse Quantification), the standard used in gynecologic practice. Mayo Clinic, Pelvic organ prolapse: diagnosis and treatment. mayoclinic.org

3. Hagen S et al. Individualised pelvic floor muscle training in women with pelvic organ prolapse (POPPY): a multicentre randomised controlled trial. The Lancet, 2014. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24290404

Hagen S, Stark D. Conservative prevention and management of pelvic organ prolapse in women. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. cochrane.org plain language summary  

4. Bump RC et al. Assessment of Kegel pelvic muscle exercise performance after brief verbal instruction. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1991. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1872333 

5. Bump RC et al. Assessment of Kegel pelvic muscle exercise performance after brief verbal instruction. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1991. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1872333

6. Stewart F et al. Electrical stimulation with non-implanted devices for stress urinary incontinence in women. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2017. cochranelibrary.com

Electrical Muscle Stimulation for the Conservative Management of Female Pelvic Floor Muscle Dysfunction: A Scoping Review. Clinical and Experimental Obstetrics and Gynecology, 2024. imrpress.com

7. The 2020 genitourinary syndrome of menopause position statement of The North American Menopause Society. Menopause, 2020. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32852449

8.  Long-term outcome after routine surgery for pelvic organ prolapse: a national register-based cohort study. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9270303

After your operation for prolapse and incontinence. Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust patient information. nnuh.nhs.uk

9. US Food and Drug Administration. Pelvic Organ Prolapse (POP): Surgical Mesh Considerations and Recommendations. fda.gov

US Food and Drug Administration. Urogynecologic Surgical Mesh Implants. fda.gov

10. Mayo Clinic, Pelvic organ prolapse: symptoms and causes, including the "When to see a doctor" section. mayoclinic.org 

11. US Food and Drug Administration, 510(k) Premarket Notification database, clearance number. accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfpmn/pmn.cfm