Improving The Benefit Of Exercise

Like many good ideas, the success of resistive exercises is based on a simple logic—strengthening a muscle by applying weight—and it adds an important development to current treatment programs. Kegel exercises, developed in the 1940s to treat pelvic floor dysfunction, have been used by patients to restore function through performing pelvic floor muscle contractions for 20 minutes, three times per day for 20 to 40 days. The introduction of two new exercise devices, the Feminine Personal Trainer (FPT) and the Maximum Pelvic Trainer (MPT), enables patients to shorten this time frame for relief by improving the benefit of the exercise.

Use of exercise to treat dysfunction

One of the key principles of therapeutic exercise for any muscle group is the overload principle. In order to see strength changes, a muscle group must be exercised at a level higher than its normal function. Muscles that are exercised under no load, even if they are exercised for hours upon end, increase little in strength. Conversely, muscles that contract at more than a 50% maximal contraction will develop strength rapidly, even if the contractions are performed only a few times every other day.

Strength improvements are generally governed by the intensity of the overload, the fundamental concept behind progressive resistive training. Simply put, progressive weight training results in strength increases with the addition of weight. Failure to incorporate progressive resistive training is the major drawback to using Kegel exercise to strengthen the pelvic floor. Kegel exercise is performed under no load, therefore requiring relatively long exercise sessions several times each day.

Another important exercise principle is specificity. Specificity refers to adaptations in the metabolic and physiologic systems of muscular tissue depending on the type of overload imposed. Specific exercises elicit specific adaptations creating specific training effects. Two very important prerequisites for an effective exercise program, then, are that it must target the correct muscles, and that the targeted muscles are trained in a fashion consistent with their normal functional use.

The overload and specificity principles form the basic foundation for effective treatment through the use of the Feminine Personal Trainer (FPT) and the Maximum Pelvic Trainer (MPT).