As a longtime yoga practitioner whose once-disciplined practice waned after childbirth, I love the idea of a yoga practice specifically centered on pelvic floor health and help with urinary incontinence. Dustienne Miller’s Your Pace Yoga website and accompanying video collection offers a wealth of information about causes, symptoms, and yoga-based poses to support our lower regions, not only for various kinds of incontinence, but also issues such as endometriosis or vulvodynia. Miller is a women’s health physical therapist and Kripalu-trained yoga teacher who blends her two areas of expertise to help us manage and strengthen our bodies.
This review is specifically about her “Optimizing Bladder Control” video (2013), so critiques for this video may or may not be true for Your Pace Yoga’s several other video options. The video costs $19.95 to download or $24.95 for the DVD. Practitioners using this video will want a yoga mat, strap, and possibly a block available to complete the poses. “Optimizing Bladder Control” begins with a helpful brief overview of pelvic anatomy; Miller uses a model skeleton to point out bones such as the lumbar spine, sacrum, coccyx, and sit, or sitz, bones and internal muscles, encouraging us to have proper posture and seated awareness. The yoga portions of the video are broken into three sections, Gravity Eliminated Flow, Standing Flow, and Calming Flow.
The first and second sections are filmed with Miller as the instructor and her student Kate as the demonstrator of the poses. Gravity Eliminated Flow begins and ends mostly on the mat, focusing heavily on meditative awareness of our muscles moving inside our pelvis. The poses consist of rotations of the pelvis and ball and hip sockets, bridge variations, cat and cow stretches, side and center plank, and hip flexor poses. The exertion is low to medium. Standing Flow offers more challenges, including muscle development via poses involving lunges, balance, and higher-level arm strength. With each pose description, Miller focuses on the pelvis muscles and using breathing techniques to build awareness and strength.
In the third section, Calming Flow, Miller does the poses herself, which consist, like the name indicates, of postures intended to relax the pelvic floor as well as the mind. Some of the postures are repetitions from earlier sections of the video, but she also includes gluteus and hamstring stretches. The final portion of the video is the “bonus material,” which bullet-points the kinds and causes of urinary incontinence as well as additional nutritional and practical suggestions to manage this condition. And while Miller does explain that tight pelvic floor muscles are a factor in UI—and strengthening them and increasing their flexibility can often help—she doesn’t go into much more detail than that about how these moves specifically relate to mitigating UI.
My criticism of “Optimizing Bladder Control” mostly has to do with presentation. The arrangement of Miller as teacher while a student does the poses feels forced and, oddly, a little voyeuristic as, for example, Kate lies in the final resting pose. Throughout the video, Miller uses both English and Sanskrit names for the postures interchangeably, often without describing the posture or how to get into it properly, so, for example, if you don’t know what a “Pigeon Pose” is, you’ll have to watch what she’s doing, which is physically awkward. Additionally, in the third section when Miller does the yoga herself, she offers too little explanation, and even remains silent for periods of time, so a practitioner definitely has to watch first, practice later. And, finally, for my money, the pace of Your Pace Yoga is often too slow and bordering on cliché, with lengthy shots of flickering candles, smiling Buddha statues, and accompanying soft music.
Overall, however, the information and poses in Miller’s video are useful. Centering a yoga practice on these three yoga flows, which all together take about an hour, would be no doubt helpful for creating optimum pelvic floor health.
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