Peeing when you don’t want to? Try yoga

Gentle yoga exercises can combat urinary incontinence in older women.

It can reduce embarrassing incidents—such as bed wetting—by as much as 65 percent.

Women who followed a 12-week programme of low-impact exercise, yoga or stretching and strengthening, reported big improvements in rates of incontinence.

Researchers from Stanford Medicine tested the two types of exercise on a group of 240 women, with an average age of 62, who were suffering from urinary incontinence.  Half followed a 12-week programme of yoga, which included 16 poses designed to strengthen the pelvic floor, for two 90-minute sessions a week, and the rest did general exercise, which focused on strengthening and stretching.

Both groups reported a reduction in episodes of urinary incontinence, which the women were experiencing an average of 3.4 times a day, although the yoga group saw bigger improvements, with 2.3 fewer episodes compared to 1.9 in the exercise group.

Urinary incontinence affects more than half of all middle-aged women, and up to 80 percent of the over-80s.

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