Pelvic Organ Prolapse: What It Is, and What You Can Do About It

Prolapse is a scary word.  It sounds ominous and dangerous.  For the vast majority of women, it is neither.  

By the time you're done reading this, you'll understand what prolapse is, what the stages mean, why it happens, and what can be done about it.

On This Page:

Prolapse Symptoms: What You Might Have Noticed

Let's start with how you'd know.  For most women, the first experience of prolapse is a feeling of heaviness, weight, or fullness low in the pelvis.  It tends to get more noticeable as the day goes on and to ease up overnight.  There's a simple reason for this:  When you're upright and moving, gravity is pulling down on everything and straining your pelvic floor muscles.  When you lie flat at night, it all settles back to where it belongs.

If you've been carrying prolapse worries around for months without mentioning it to anyone, you are not alone. Perhaps you did mention it, got checked, and were told everything looked fine. Early prolapse is vague by nature. That isn't you being dramatic or imagining things. It's genuinely what the early stage feels like, and it's the reason so many women go years without a name for it.

Other early prolapse signs include tampons that don't sit right, sex that's become uncomfortable, a low backache, and a bladder that empties more slowly than it used to.

These are easy symptoms to sweep under the rug, and a lot of women do exactly that.

As prolapse progresses, the heaviness arrives earlier in the day and weighs more. Some women begin to notice a bulge lower in the pelvis, sometimes at the entrance of the vagina. Symptoms grow in both intensity and duration, and emptying the bladder or bowels may become more difficult.

Wherever you are in this, please know you are not alone. When doctors examine for prolapse, they find some degree of it in roughly four women out of ten. Only about 3% of women ever report feeling a bulge, and mild prolapse of the vaginal wall is so common that many specialists consider it part of the normal range rather than a disease.1  There is a great deal of support available, and plenty you can do. Keep reading.

Why prolapse happens, and why it isn’t your fault.

This is not something you did. It is not the result of skipping your kegels, or going back to the gym too soon, or picking up the toddler when somebody told you not to. The things that most determine whether a woman develops prolapse are whether she gave birth, how that birth went, what her hormones are doing, and what collagen she inherited. Not one of those is a choice.

If anything went wrong here, it's that nobody told us any of it. Most women go through pregnancy, birth, and the years afterwards without one clear conversation about the pelvic floor, what it does, or what happens to it along the way. That's a gap in how women's health gets taught, and you've been on the wrong end of it. It is not a failing of yours.

Emotional Prolapse Symptoms

There's a part of this that doesn't show up in any examination, and it's often the part doing the most damage.

When researchers have sat down and asked women what living with prolapse is actually like, the physical symptoms are rarely what they lead with. They describe feeling broken. Weakened. Less of a woman than they were. They talk about guilt, about whether they're still the mother they meant to be when they can't pick up their toddler the way they used to. Some avoid sex for months, not because it hurts, but because they feel self-conscious in a body they no longer quite recognize.

If any of that is sitting in your chest while you read this, you should know it is a documented, ordinary part of this condition. It is not an overreaction and it is not a character flaw.

A lot of it comes from the silence. Prolapse happens in a part of the body nobody discusses over dinner, and the first instinct is almost always to say nothing. So you carry it alone, and with nobody else's experience to measure yours against, your own starts to feel uniquely awful. Women routinely go years before telling a single person, sometimes including their partner and their doctor.

Then there are the losses that aren't medical at all. Women give up running, dancing, hiking, the gym. Often nobody actually told them to stop. They stopped on their own, frightened of making things worse. Those things were never just exercise. They were how you handled stress, how you felt strong, how you got an hour that belonged to you. Losing them costs far more than the activity did.

Underneath all of it sits the fear of what comes next. Is this the beginning of something that keeps going? Will menopause make it worse? Will I end up needing surgery? Nobody answered those at the appointment, so your mind answered them for you, and it almost certainly answered worse than the truth.

Here's what we'd like you to take from this. These feelings are a reasonable response to something that impacts your body, your intimacy, your work and your sense of who you are, usually with nobody to talk to about any of it. Naming them isn't self-indulgence. It's the part of this that tends to shift fastest, once you understand what's actually happening and you have a plan.

If it has gone further than that, and the heavy days are outnumbering the rest, that's worth raising with your doctor in the same conversation as the physical symptoms. It belongs there. It's part of the same condition, and it deserves the same attention.

Understanding Types of Prolapse

Picture the vagina as a soft tube. It has a front wall and a back wall. On the other side of the front wall sits your bladder. On the other side of the back wall sits your rectum. At the top sits your uterus. All of it is packed in together, each thing leaning on its neighbour.

Prolapse is one of those neighbours pressing in where it used to stay put. That's the entire concept. The different names only tell you which neighbour, and which wall.

The names are far less frightening than they look once you know the trick to them. The ending "cele" just means a bulge. Cysto is bladder. Recto is rectum. Entero is intestine. So cystocele means, more or less, bladder bulge. That's all. Somebody simply said it in Greek.

One last thing before we go through them. It is very common to have more than one type of prolapse at the same time, and that doesn't mean things are worse than you thought. It's just how the anatomy works. When support loosens, it rarely loosens in only one spot.

Cystocele: front wall, bladder

The most common type by a wide margin. Your bladder presses back into the front wall of the vagina.

Because the bladder is involved, the symptoms tend to be bladder symptoms. Pressure toward the front. A bladder that never quite empties, so you go, and twenty minutes later you need to go again. Some women leak a little when they cough, sneeze or laugh. Some find they get urinary infections more often than they used to, because urine that doesn't fully clear has somewhere to sit.

You may also see the word urethrocele, which refers to the urethra sagging in the same area. It's sometimes listed as its own type, but in practice it nearly always turns up alongside a cystocele rather than on its own.

Rectocele: back wall, rectum

Your rectum presses forward into the back wall of the vagina.

The symptoms here are bowel symptoms, and this is the type women are most reluctant to describe to anyone. Difficulty emptying the bowel. A feeling of being blocked, or of never finishing. Some women find they have to press on the back wall of the vagina, or on the skin between the vagina and the anus, to get things moving at all. That's splinting, and it's common enough that specialists ask about it as a matter of routine. If you've been doing it in silence for years, you can put that particular weight down.

Uterine prolapse: the uterus itself sitting lower

The uterus descends into the vagina rather than staying up where it was.

This is the type most associated with the classic heaviness and dragging, because the uterus has genuine weight to it. A low backache that doesn't match anything you did. A sense of something sitting low that gets worse the longer you're on your feet. Sex that feels different, or like something's in the way. Further along, something you can feel at or past the vaginal opening.

Enterocele: upper back wall, small bowel

The small intestine presses into the upper part of the back vaginal wall.

Less common on its own, and it often appears alongside vault prolapse after a hysterectomy. The symptoms tend to be a dragging fullness that's worse standing and eases once you've been lying down.

You don't need to work out which of these you have. A doctor or a pelvic floor physiotherapist can tell you in a few minutes, and the type matters mostly because it shapes which symptoms you get and which treatments are likely to help you.

 What's worth taking away from this section is simpler than the vocabulary suggests. Every one of these is a support problem, not a disease. Nothing is growing. Nothing is damaged beyond use. Things are sitting lower than they used to sit.

Understanding the stages of prolapse

Prolapse is measured in stages, and your prolapse stage is important when you are deciding what to do about it. The 4 stages of prolapse describe one thing only: how far the organ has descended. These stages are not a measure of how uncomfortable you are, and they are not a prediction of where things are heading.

Doctors generally describe four stages of prolapse2:

Stage 1

The organ has shifted downward but stays well inside the vaginal canal. Most women at this stage feel nothing at all. Some notice a vague heaviness late in the day, or after lifting something awkward. Stage 1 is very common, and it is often found during a routine exam rather than because anything felt wrong.

Stage 2

The organ descent has reached the vaginal opening, or close to it. This is usually where symptoms start to register. The heaviness becomes more consistent and is often worse by evening. Some women feel a sense of fullness, or notice that tampons no longer sit the way they used to.

Stage 3

The organ now extends past the vaginal opening and can usually be felt, often seen. Symptoms become difficult to ignore, and some in this stage will have trouble emptying the bladder or bowel completely.

Stage 4

The vaginal wall turns outwards, and the organ behind may sit outside of the opening.  The organ itself is not outside the body exposed, which is a very common and understandable fear.  Stage 4 is the least common stage of prolapse.

Where strengthening helps, and where it does not

This part deserves to be said plainly.

Pelvic floor strengthening has the strongest evidence behind it at stages 1 and 2, where the supporting muscles have weakened but the structure is still largely intact3.  Building strength there can reduce symptoms, and for some women it improves the measured stage.

At stages 3 and 4, strengthening alone is less likely to pull things back. The supporting tissue may have stretched further than muscle tone can compensate for. Women at these stages are usually looking at a pessary or surgical repair, and strengthening becomes something done alongside other treatments.

If you do not know your stage, ask for it. A pelvic exam establishes your stage of prolapse in a couple of minutes, and knowing it helps you take the actions that will be most helpful to your situation.

What Actually Helps Prolapse

There's no single answer here, and anybody who tells you there is wants something from you. What follows is the honest landscape, cheapest and simplest first.

Stop straining

This is free, it's unglamorous, and it's the one most women skip past.

Every time you strain on the toilet, you're pushing down on exactly the structures that are already struggling. Years of that adds up, and it's one of the few causes of prolapse that's genuinely within your control. Enough fiber and enough water so that nothing requires effort. A small footstool so your knees sit above your hips, which changes the angle and does a surprising amount of the work for you. And no pushing. If it isn't ready, come back later.

What this won't do is lift anything back up. It stops you making things worse, which matters more than it sounds.

Pay attention to how you lift and move

You don't need to stop exercising. That advice gets handed out far too freely and it costs women their fitness, their strength and their sanity for very little return.

What helps is how you do it. Breathing out on the effort instead of holding your breath and bearing down. Being thoughtful about heavy overhead lifting and very heavy loads. Building strength through your hips and trunk, which support the whole system. If you're carrying extra weight, losing some of it reduces the downward load, and that's worth saying plainly rather than tiptoeing around.

Manual Kegel exercises

The classic advice, and it isn't wrong. Pelvic floor muscle training has solid trial evidence behind it for improving the symptoms of mild to moderate prolapse. It's also free, private, and available to you this afternoon.

The problem is in the doing. When researchers have actually checked, a large share of women working from written or spoken instructions alone aren't contracting the right muscles, and some are pushing down instead of lifting, which is worse than doing nothing5. There's no feedback, so you can't tell whether today's effort accomplished anything. It takes months before you'd notice a change. And it's dull, which is why most women start, drift, and quietly stop by week three.

If you're going to do them manually, get somebody to confirm you're doing them correctly first. That one step changes everything about whether this works.

Pelvic floor physiotherapy

This is the gold standard, and if you can get it, get it.

A pelvic floor physiotherapist will actually assess what's going on, tell you which muscles are weak and which are too tight, teach you what a correct contraction feels like, and build a program for your situation rather than a generic one. They'll also look at your breathing, your posture and your bowel habits, because all of it connects. The research on prolapse symptoms improving with supervised training is the strongest evidence in this whole field.

The catch is access. In most of North America you're looking at well over a hundred dollars a session, often several sessions, frequently not covered by insurance. Waitlists can run months. If you're outside a city there may not be anyone within driving distance. And the assessment is internal, which some women simply won't do, and that's a legitimate choice.

Worth knowing: physiotherapy still relies on you doing the work at home between appointments. The appointments teach you how. The results come from the daily practice.

Pelvic floor training with a device

This is where electrical stimulation devices like YoniFlex sit, and it's worth being clear about what they do and don't solve.

What they solve is the technique problem. An EMS device contracts the muscle for you, so whether you've correctly identified the right muscle stops mattering6. You don't need to wonder if it's working. You don't need an appointment or a drive or a waitlist, and you can do it at home with nobody else involved, which for a lot of women is the difference between doing it and not. 

YoniFlex also reduces the difficulty of manual kegel exercises.  Squeezing and relaxing these muscles 20 times in a row is difficult, and for some, whose muscles are very weak, nearly impossible.  Having a device automatically and correctly tightening these muscles at a targeted intensity and length can be a game changer for some women.

What they don't solve is everything else. A device can't assess you, so it won't tell you if your real problem is a pelvic floor that's too tight rather than too weak, and in that case strengthening is the wrong treatment. It's money up front rather than free. And it asks for consistency over months, same as every other option here.

We'll go into more detail on how this works further down.

Vaginal estrogen

If you're in perimenopause or postmenopausal, this is worth raising with your doctor.

Low-dose vaginal estrogen improves the quality and thickness of the tissue in the vaginal wall, urethra, and bladder neck7. It won't lift a prolapse on its own, but better tissue responds better to everything else you do, and it often helps the dryness and irritation that ride along with prolapse during perimenopause and after menopause. It's a prescription, and it's a different thing from systemic hormone therapy, with a different risk profile.

A pessary

A pessary is a small silicone device fitted into the vagina to physically hold things where they belong. It's been used for well over a century and it's still one of the main non-surgical treatments for prolapse.

The appeal is that it works immediately and it works at any stage. There's no waiting three months to find out. It's reversible, there's no surgery involved, and plenty of women use one for years perfectly happily.

The trade-offs are real though. You need a clinician to fit it, and getting the right size and shape can take a few attempts. It needs removing and cleaning on a schedule. Some women get discharge or irritation. Some can't keep one in place at all. And it holds things up without changing anything underneath, so it manages the problem rather than improving it.

Plenty of women use a pessary and do muscle training at the same time. Those two aren't in competition.

Pelvic floor surgery

For most women, surgery will be a last resort, and it is with good reason.

Surgery is an operation, with potentially long recovery times, risks of infection, and significant post-surgery restrictions. Expect weeks rather than days, with real limits on lifting and activity for six to twelve weeks afterward.

Surgery is also not guaranteed to be effective. In long-term studies, between seven and twenty percent of women who have prolapse surgery go back for a second one8.

The majority of professionals will suggest the other methods discussed here, pelvic floor training, pessaries, and health-related improvements, before surgery. And with good reason.

None of this is a reason to rule it out. You just need to go into it with your eyes open.

If you have already tried the less invasive options without success, or if your bowel or bladder is not emptying, surgery may be what finally gives you your life back.

On mesh surgery, because it's the thing women ask about and worry about most. The transvaginal mesh products used for prolapse repair were ordered off the US market in 2019 after significant harm, and most modern prolapse repairs use your own tissue rather than mesh9. If you're considering surgery, ask your surgeon directly what they're planning to use and why.

A holistic approach

Like many things in life, the answer to helping prolapse does not have a single answer.

It is most often a combination of several of these suggestions working together that can truly provide help. 

A common path looks like fixing the bowel habits, eating more fibre, learning to lift differently, doing pelvic floor muscle exercises properly for several months, and adding a pessary or surgery later if things progress. Another woman gets a pessary for immediate relief and does the strengthening alongside it. Neither of them is doing it wrong. 

A common thread

In all of these examples, the underlying theme is the importance of strengthening, and keeping strong the pelvic floor muscles that hold everything in place.

Whether you are just starting to feel the beginning sensations of prolapse, or have been struggling with prolapse for years, strengthening the muscles, through Kegels, a YoniFlex Trainer, or with a pelvic floor therapist needs to be part of your health routine.

Using a pessary can reduce the symptoms of prolapse, but won't strengthen the underlying muscles responsible for holding everything in its place.  Surgery can work, but if the muscles underneath remain weak, prolapse is likely to happen again.  

When to seek Professional Help

In many situations, mild to moderate prolapse can be managed without medical treatment.  There are a number of 'red flags' to watch out for.  If you experience any of these, it is highly recommended that you make an appointment with a health care professional10.

  • Bleeding that isn't your period 
  • Any bleeding after menopause
  • Pelvic Pain
  • Not being able to empty your bladder
  • A bulge that stays outside your body, or becomes sore, raw, or develops an odour
  • Sudden or quickly changing symptoms
  • Symptoms that don't ease when lying down

None of those mean something terrible is happening. They mean the explanation might not be the one you've settled on, and you deserve a better answer than any website can give you.

Who to see depends on where you live. A family doctor can examine you and refer you onward. A gynecologist or urogynecologist can stage it properly and talk through surgical options if it ever comes to that. A pelvic floor physiotherapist assesses the muscles themselves, which is a different examination and often a more useful one, and in many places you can book directly without a referral.

Frequently Asked Prolapse 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 we receive:

Why did my doctor say my prolapse is mild when I feel terrible?

Staging describes how far something has physically moved when a clinician looks. Your symptoms describe what it's doing to your life. The research is consistent and slightly maddening on this point: symptom severity does not track well with stage. A woman at stage 1 can be thoroughly miserable. A woman at stage 3 can tell you she barely notices it.

So if you came out of an appointment feeling like you'd been told your problem was too small to count, that isn't what was said, even if it's what you heard. "Mild" was a measurement, not a verdict on how much you're allowed to be bothered.

It matters practically too. Your stage tells you what's physically fixable and by what means.  Don't let the medical terms steer you away from seeking the help you need and deserve.

Does prolapse happen to young women?

Yes, it happens quite often to young women. 

Prolapse is closely tied to childbirth, which means a great many women meet it in their twenties and thirties, often within the first year after a baby. It also turns up in women who have never been pregnant, usually linked to inherited connective tissue, years of heavy lifting or high-impact sports, or long-term constipation.

If every article you've found seems to be written for women thirty years older than you, that's a problem with the articles, not with you. 


Is prolapse dangerous?

Prolapse is uncomfortable, it is frustrating, and it can affect your life considerably, but for most women is not a threat to your health.

The exceptions are advanced cases where the bladder can't empty properly or an exposed bulge becomes raw and infected. Those cases require medical attention.

Will my prolapse keep getting worse?

Not necessarily, and this is the fear that keeps women awake. Plenty of women stay at the same stage for decades. Prolapse tends to progress when the things causing it carry on unchecked, which is why the unglamorous stuff earlier on this page matters so much. Working on reducing straining, lifting differently, and doing the muscle work genuinely changes the trajectory for a lot of women.

Menopause is the one period where things commonly shift, because of what falling estrogen does to the tissue.

Will perimenopause/menopause make prolapse worse?

Yes, it can, and this is the one stretch of life where prolapse commonly progresses rather than holding steady.

The reason is estrogen. As it falls, the tissue in and around the pelvic floor loses collagen and elasticity, so the same support structures that managed fine for twenty years have less to work with. Plenty of women who had mild symptoms for years find their sympoms become more noticable somewhere in their late forties or early fifties.

It isn't inevitable, and this is the point where doing something makes the most difference. Low-dose vaginal estrogen improves the tissue quality directly, and it's worth a conversation with your doctor. Muscle work matters more now rather than less, because you're working against a headwind instead of with a tailwind.

If you're reading this in your forties and nothing much is wrong yet, that's the best possible moment to start.

Can I still exercise? Can I lift weights?

Yes, and please do. The advice to stop lifting anything gets handed out far too readily, and it costs women their strength for very little in return.

What needs to change is your technique rather than your activity.

Breathe out on the effort rather than holding your breath and bearing down. Be thoughtful about very heavy loads and overhead lifting. Running and impact work are fine for most women, though some notice symptoms more afterward, and if that's you, a pelvic floor physical therapist can help you work out why.

Can I still do my job with prolapse?

Almost certainly, and you probably don't need to change careers. Standing for long stretches and lifting repeatedly will make your symptoms more noticeable by the end of a shift. That's the gravity thing again. What's important is that worse symptoms at 5 p.m. are not the same as worse prolapse. A heavy day makes the day harder. It isn't quietly causing damage while you work.

A few things genuinely help if you're a nurse, a hairdresser, in retail, in a warehouse, or anywhere else that keeps you upright for eight hours. Take some breaks from standing where you can, even briefly. Breathe out on the lift rather than holding your breath. Build strength through your hips and trunk, because they carry load the pelvic floor would otherwise take.

One option that gets mentioned far too rarely: some women use a pessary specifically for work days or for exercise, and not the rest of the time. It's a perfectly legitimate way to use one, and if long shifts are the hardest part of your week, it's well worth asking about.

Will Sex Make my prolapse worse?

No. Intercourse does not worsen prolapse.

This fear stops a lot of women from having sex at all, so it's worth being direct. The things that cause prolapse are sustained downward load over months and years, and the stretching that happens during childbirth. Sex isn't either of those. There is no mechanism by which normal intercourse pushes a prolapse further along, and arousal actually draws the pelvic floor upward rather than down.

What you may notice is that it feels different, or that some positions are more comfortable than others, or that dryness has become part of the picture, which is very common after menopause and easily helped.

The one thing worth acting on is pain. Sex that hurts should be assessed by a health care professional, because pain often points to something other than prolapse.

Can kegels make prolapse worse?

Yes, reasearch suggests only about half of women performing Kegel exercises are doing them correctly.

If you're bearing down instead of lifting, you're doing the opposite of the exercise.

The idea with a Kegel exercise is to think of pulling the muscle up and into your body.  

If your pelvic floor is actually too tight rather than too weak, then strengthening is the wrong treatment entirely.  Pelvic floor tightness is often accompanied by pelvic pain.

Can I have another baby?

Yes. Prolapse doesn't prevent you from conceiving or carrying a pregnancy.

The honest part is that pregnancy and birth will probably make your symptoms worse for a while, because you're adding months of load to a floor already under strain. The reassuring part is that symptoms frequently settle again in the year afterward, the same way they do after a first baby.

Where it genuinely matters is surgery. Surgeons will usually advise waiting until you've finished having children before any repair, because a later birth can undo the work. That's advice about the timing of an operation though, not advice about whether to have a child.

In the meantime, muscle work is still worth doing. You aren't wasting effort strengthening something that another pregnancy will stretch. You're going into that pregnancy with more to start from. 

Can I have sex with prolapse? Will my partner be able to feel it?

For the most part, yes, and for mild to moderate prolapse, your partner will usually not feel anything different.

This is the question women search for at midnight and ask nobody. Prolapse doesn't make sex unsafe or off-limits.

At the earlier stages, most partners don't notice anything at all. Further along, some do. Many women find certain positions more comfortable than others, and a lubricant helps if dryness is part of the picture.

If sex has become painful, that's worth getting looked at, because pain often points to something beyond prolapse.

Can prolapse heal on its own?

Partly, and it depends on timing. In the first year after giving birth, tissues are still recovering and symptoms often improve on their own, sometimes a lot.

Established prolapse, the kind that's been there for years, doesn't usually reverse by itself. What it does do is respond to work, which isn't the same thing as healing but gets you to a similar place.

Am I too old to get help?

We have customers who are in their late 80s and benefits from pelvic floor strengthening.

You are never too old to start strengheningyour body, on the outside and on the inside. Just keep expectations reasonable, because the process is slower as we age.

I've had prolapse for twenty years. Is it too late?

No. Muscle responds to training at seventy as well as at forty, more slowly but it responds.

What matters is how far along the prolapse is, not how long you've had it. A woman who's quietly lived with stage 1 for two decades has more to gain from muscle work than someone who reached stage 3 last year. The honest version is that your stage sets the ceiling on what muscle work can do, which is the whole argument for getting examined before you spend money on anything.

Where do I get a pessary?

From a clinician, not from the internet. A family doctor, gynecologist or urogynecologist can fit one, and in some places pelvic floor physical therapists are trained to fit them as well.

Fitting the pessary to your body matters a great deal.  Pessaries come in different shapes and sizes.  Getting the right one often takes two or three attempts.  A poorly fitted pessary is uncomfortable at best.

Pessaries are sold online, but buying one online is not recommended. Buying one without being fitted is risky.

How much does a pelvic floor physiotherapist cost?

In the US, expect roughly $150 to $250 USD for an initial assessment and $100 to $175 USD for follow-ups. In Canada, usually $90 to $150 CAD a session. Most women need somewhere between four and eight appointments.

Some extended health or insurance plans cover it and many don't, so ask before you book. If cost is the barrier, a single assessment appointment to confirm you're doing the exercises correctly is worth far more than nothing, and some physiotherapists will set you up and send you off rather than insisting on a full course.

How much does YoniFlex cost?

The complete YoniFlex kit is $219. That's a one-time cost.  There's no subscription, or monthly fees.

For comparison, that's roughly one and a half sessions with a pelvic floor physiotherapist in the US. 

How long before I notice improvement?

Most women who do the muscle exercise consistently notice something at around six to eight weeks, usually that the heaviness arrives later in the day than it used to. Meaningful change tends to land around the three-month mark, and the research trials ran for four to six months before measuring. 

Just like when you start going to the gym for the first time, it can take a few months to see the benefits of the exercise.  Have patience, commit to regular exercises, and in most cases you should see improvements.

What is YoniFlex?

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

YoniFlex is an FDA cleared11 pelvic floor trainer you use at home. What arrives is a small handheld rechargable device with a color screen, and a probe that connects to it by a thin cable. The probe inserts 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 prolapse. 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 Pelvic Organ Prolapse 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.

Association for Pelvic Organ Prolapse Support is a non-profit run by and for women living with prolapse. Community, shared experience, and the particular relief of reading somebody else describe the thing you couldn't find words for. If you only visit one link on this page, make it this one.

The APTA Academy of Pelvic Health can help you find a pelvic floor therapist in the United States.  They keep a searchable directory you can filter by location.

They also maintain a separate list of CAPP-certified therapists who have completed additional pelvic health training.

In Canada, Pelvic Health Solutions lists trained practitioners across the country, and the Canadian Society for Pelvic Medicine has a find-a-provider tool that covers physicians as well as therapists.

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

Strengthening is the common thread.

A holistic approach includes strenghening your pelvic floor muscles.  That is what YoniFlex does for you.

See the YoniFlex Trainer

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  

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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

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