Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Lifestyle and home remedies
By Mayo Clinic staffDepending on the severity of the condition, self-care measures may provide the relief you need.
Self-care measures you can take:
- Perform Kegel exercises.
- Avoid constipation by eating high-fiber foods and drinking plenty of fluids.
- Avoid heavy lifting.
- Try to control coughing.
- Lose weight if you're overweight or obese.
Kegel exercises
Kegel exercises, designed to strengthen your pelvic floor muscles (including your fascia), can help both prevent and treat a rectocele. To perform Kegel exercises:
- Pull in your pelvic floor muscles — the muscles you use to stop urinating.
- Hold them for a count of five and then relax for a count of five.
- Work up to 10 to 15 repetitions at a time.
- Repeat three times daily.
Kegel exercises may be most successful when they're taught by a therapist using biofeedback. Biofeedback uses information from a variety of (pain-free) monitoring devices to help teach you to control certain involuntary body responses, such as muscle tension. In this case, biofeedback can help ensure you're contracting the proper muscles, and that the intensity and duration of the muscle contractions are optimal.
