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  • 3 weeks ago
In this segment of ESSENCE Now's "Health Myths Busted" panel, Dr. Jessica Shepherd, Dr. Drai and Dr. Nita Landry discuss how to keep your vagina strong after pregnancy with Kegels and pelvic physical therapy.
Transcript
00:00I'm pregnant with my first child but I've heard that label will leave my vagina too
00:07loose and will make sex unenjoyable. What can I do to tighten up post baby? Are Kegels
00:12the only option? Signed, Confused and St. Louis. Please help Confused and St. Louis out.
00:17What's that? So the vagina is a muscle just like my muscles right here, right? So you
00:21have to exercise it. So the way you could do it is by doing simply Kegels. It's the
00:25same thing you do when like you fake orgasms, right? You squeeze in and you let go, right?
00:29So you can do it three times in ten minutes to exercise the vagina or you can
00:33use something called a Benway ball which are resistance balls that you can put
00:37inside the vagina. The trick is, ladies, make sure you wear undies when you're
00:41doing this. Oh, will they fall out? They will fall out if you don't have enough
00:44strength. So make sure you use undies while you're using the Benway balls. Is there
00:47a difference between if you've had multiple children or not in terms of
00:51doing these exercises and the importance of them or does it matter really after
00:54you've had children? So the more babies you have the looser the vagina is gonna be.
00:57So you definitely want to, you want to do more and more exercises. Super important.
01:01The one thing I also say for that is and I've sent a lot of my patients to a pelvic
01:06physical therapist. I really use pelvic physical therapists so much. So they just
01:11like you go to physical therapists if you hurt your back, if you hurt your knee, they
01:14will actually evaluate your pelvis. The pelvis is full of so many different
01:17muscles and they will actually help you identify which are the muscles that need
01:21help, give you the exercises and also we can do things like trigger point
01:25injections and also there are really good in addition to the balls that you meant
01:29but not those balls, you know other balls. There is a new it's like a gadget and I
01:35love gadgets as a surgeon but it actually is something you can really look at the
01:39biofeedback of the muscles and so again you insert it into the vagina but it
01:44regulates and tells you if you should hold it stronger, longer and it gives you all
01:49that feedback onto an app on your phone.
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