1 in 3 women who have had a baby leak urine. The fix is proven. Almost nobody does it right.
A review of 31 trials found women were about eight times more likely to report a cure doing pelvic floor exercises. The catch is that most women cannot tell whether they are doing them correctly.
See the 10-minute method →Non-insertable · Done sitting down, fully dressedIf you leak when you sneeze, cough or laugh, the exercises that fix it are proven — you are just doing them blind
It is not bladder weakness and it is not permanent. It is a muscle closing a fraction of a second too late, and muscle responds to training. Here is why the training almost always fails, and the one thing that changes it.
Let us be blunt, because everyone else is vague and the vagueness is part of the problem. You leak urine when you sneeze, cough, laugh, lift something or land badly. Not a lot. Enough that you wear a liner, or you have worked out which seat to take, or you have quietly stopped doing one specific thing you used to do.
Roughly one in three women who have had a baby do exactly the same. It is not rare, it is not a personal failing, and it is not something you have to manage forever with a product that only catches it. It is a muscle problem with a real evidence base behind the fix — which is more than most things in women's health can say.
What is actually happening when you leak
The pelvic floor is a hammock of muscle slung between your hip bones, and your bladder sits on top of it. When you sneeze, pressure drops straight down onto that hammock. It is supposed to tighten in the same instant and hold everything shut.
Childbirth stretches it. Menopause thins the tissue that kept it firm. A stretched muscle is a slow muscle, and a slow muscle closes a fraction of a second too late. That fraction of a second is the leak. So the problem is not your bladder and it is not permanent — it is weakness, and weakness responds to resistance.
Nothing. A pad catches urine. It has no effect whatsoever on the muscle that let it through. Ten years of pads runs to about $1,400 and leaves you exactly where you started, except ten years older.
So why hasn't it worked for you already?
Because you were handed a leaflet. Pelvic floor exercises are the first thing recommended, long before anyone mentions surgery, and every woman who has had a baby has been told to do them. Almost nobody is still doing them three months later — and the reason is not discipline.
That is the entire gap between the evidence and your bathroom cabinet. The exercise is proven. The exercise done blind, against no resistance, with no way to tell whether the right muscle even moved, is not the same exercise.
The part that makes it a real exercise
Cora is two padded arms on a spring. Sit on any chair, put it between your knees, press them together, hold five seconds, let them open. The spring pushes back — so the muscle is finally working against something you can feel, and the arms visibly move, so you know the rep counted.
It is non-insertable. You stay fully dressed. It takes ten minutes, and there is nothing to charge, nothing to pair to a phone, nothing to wash and nothing to hide if somebody walks in — which, if you ask women why they abandoned the insertable one they bought, is very close to the top of the list.
The eight-times figure belongs to the exercises, not to this device. Nobody has run a trial on Cora. What it does is make a proven exercise possible to do properly on your own. If your leaking is heavy, sudden, painful, came on fast, or you feel a bulge or heaviness, see a doctor or a pelvic health physio — that is a different problem.
What changes, and when
It behaves like muscle, because it is muscle. Nothing happens in week one. Most women notice something in weeks three to four, and it is rarely dramatic — a sneeze in a supermarket that did not need bracing for, standing up off the sofa without the half-second calculation first.
The thing women describe getting back is rarely the leak itself. It is the arithmetic — where the toilets are, which seat to take, whether the spare pair is in this handbag — finally switching off after years of running in the background.
Reader offer: Cora Pelvic Floor Trainer
- Non-insertable — used sitting down, fully dressed
- Ten minutes a day on any ordinary chair
- Sprung resistance, so you can feel the rep count
- No battery, no app, nothing to clean
- Plain unmarked box, neutral sender name
- 60 days to send it back, return shipping paid
You have almost certainly not read this far out of general interest. The exercises were always the right answer. They just needed something to push back.
2,238 comments
Nobody ever told me the eight times thing. I was handed a photocopied sheet in 2011 and that was the end of it. Four weeks in and I sneezed in Coles without bracing first.
I bought the insertable one years ago and used it twice because it was a hassle. This one lives next to the kettle. That is the only reason it worked for me.
62 and back at aqua aerobics twice a week. Not perfect but I stopped buying the pads in March. My sister has ordered one.
The feedback thing is the whole article really. I did the exercises for years and I now think I was doing them wrong the entire time.