The Vagina Coach Kim Vopni: How to Stop Leaking & Stay Strong | #172

**Kim Vopni** (0:00)
95.3% of women with low back pain have some form of pelvic floor dysfunction, and most don't know.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:05)
Oh my gosh, orthopedic surgeons, if you're listening, we need to know that. Today, we have the country's expert on pelvic floor health, Kim Vopni. Can you give us words to describe what we may be feeling, but don't know what we're feeling?

**Kim Vopni** (0:19)
We have urgent continence, that's feeling like, oh my gosh, where's the bathroom? I need it right now. It comes out of the blue, key in the door syndrome. Every time I come home and put my key in my door, I feel like I can't make it to the bathroom in time. Part of what happens when we're leaking is a poor response time or reaction time at the pelvic floor. So it can't react quickly enough or it's not anticipating that load coming and or it's not able to generate the force we need to meet the demand of that load.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:43)
Pelvic floor skeletal muscle. Like any skeletal muscle at any age, you can first train your neuromuscular pathways to make it fire better and then you can train the actual muscle belly to be stronger.

**Kim Vopni** (0:54)
There's a perception that a tight vagina or a tight pelvic floor is what we are after. Tight is weak. Continence is one of the major risk factors for fall risk.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (1:02)
Yes, and therefore death, 30% of the time.

**Kim Vopni** (1:05)
Let's get that optimized so you can do all the other things and live life to the fullest.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (1:11)
I am so thrilled that you're here and I want to thank you as my audience for being smart and curious and generous and sharing the Dr Vonda podcast with all your friends. You know, this podcast has been around for a long time, but you have pushed it into consistently being in the top five, six, seven in all medicine podcasts across the world, and in the top 100 of all health and wellness podcasts. That is a huge deal because you are helping not only yourself, but other men and women around the globe understand their health. So I'm thankful. I want you to keep sharing. I want you to subscribe. The more you subscribe and support this podcast, the better we will be able to bring you the information that's transforming your lives. So I just want to thank you. We're going to talk about a secret today, a secret that 80 percent of all women have. But it doesn't have to be a secret, and we should not avoid talking about it. There are real solutions.
Because what we're going to talk about today, your pelvic floor health, affects women of all ages, it affects women of all activity levels. And the more we talk about it, the less of a secret it's going to be, and the more solutions we'll have. And today we have, arguably, the country's expert on pelvic floor health, Kim Vopni. You laugh when I say that, but you are everywhere online at live conferences. I met you in person out at a big Women's Health Conference last year.
So if you have not met The Vagina Coach, Kim is a certified fitness professional, a pelvic floor educator, a menopause support practitioner, coined the turn, the buff-muff method.
You gotta tell us how you came up with that. But so many educational things you have developed that we're gonna go through today. So I'm thankful to have you, Kim.

**Kim Vopni** (3:25)
Well, I'm thankful to be here and for having the conversation. Thank you.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (3:28)
Absolutely. So I think it is a surprise to women when I talk about how many of us have incontinence, whether it's all the time incontinence, whether it's only when we're laughing so hysterically that we pee our pants, or whether we're working out and box jumping like so many CrossFit and Power athletes do.
OMG, could we just talk about this in more than just do a few more Kegels because that's all you need to do, right?

**Kim Vopni** (4:05)
Thousand percent.
It's a part of the body that is much more complex than we really know. And part of that is because we've never received any education about it. And to think that it could be taken down to just one exercise called a Kegel exercise, or disrespect to Dr. Arnold Kegel, but we need a much more robust view and training. First, we need the education, though, and that's the biggest myth or the biggest thing we need to break. And it needs to start earlier in life, but we also need a conversation more than just incontinence, because we can experience other challenges. And there's lots of shame and taboo around the pelvic floor, so it just simply doesn't get talked about. Or when it does, we are told that it's just Kegels, or it's just part of being a woman, and we just have to wear pads for the rest of our life. So we need a different PR team.