Let’s go over some tips to poop like a pro! First off, we want to make sure we have the starting position just right. We should sit on the toilet with our feet on a step stool so our knees are at the same height as our hips (having your knees a bit higher than your hips is ok too!). Relax forward and try to let your body get comfortable. Sometimes if we’re nervous about going poop we make all the muscles in our body tight. If it’s hurt to go poop before, it can be especially tricky not to squeeze everything! Good news, though! Relaxing your bottom muscles and using your belly muscles to push the poop out instead actually makes pooping easier! We’ll go over how to use our belly muscles next.
Squeezing the side of our belly muscles while keeping our bottom muscles quiet (including those hidden pelvic floor muscles we’ve talked about) can be a challenge! Don’t be worried if you don’t get it right away. It takes practice just like any new skill! What I like to tell kids is to focus on the two steps of “Belly Big, Belly Hard” when first starting out. “Belly Big” is when you breathe in through your nose and let your belly inflate like a balloon. Next, do a long slow blow like you are trying to keep a pinwheel spinning for as long as you can. While you blow out slowly through your lips, see if you can make the sides of your belly tighten up – this is the “Belly Hard” part! What you should NOT do is suck your belly in while you blow out. Keep your belly button forward the whole time! If you feel the sides of your belly while you do the long slow blow, you should be able to feel these muscles harden up under your fingers.
While we are doing “Belly Big, Belly Hard”, we want to make sure we keep our bottom and pelvic floor muscles as quiet as we can. You may feel your bottom muscles drop down towards the toilet bowl when you are blowing out and doing the “Belly Hard”. If you feel this, BRAVO! You’re doing exactly the right thing! If you haven’t felt this yet, don’t worry. Keep focusing on “Belly Big, Belly Hard” and take your time.
“Belly Big, Belly Hard” pooping is sometimes a bit slower than just holding your breath and pushing the poop out as hard as you can. However, “Belly Big, Belly Hard” pooping is easier on your body, makes it more likely that you’ll get all of the poop out, and won’t hurt the way pushing hard and holding your breath can. You should spend about 3 to 5 minutes using “Belly Big, Belly Hard” even if poop does come out quickly.
Now that you’ve got “Belly Big, Belly Hard” down pat, let’s go over a few other pooping tips before we finish!
There are some things we can do to make our bodies more likely to want to go poop. The more of these steps we put together at one time, the more likely we are to go. When you do any of the below steps, try to go poop within about 20 minutes by sitting on the toilet and doing 3 to 5 minutes of “Belly Big, Belly Hard”. If no poop comes within 5 minutes, get up and try again later.
- You are more likely to go poop after eating breakfast, lunch or dinner. This works even better if you drink water with your meals!
- You can do a “belly massage” to get things moving! You can do this by yourself or ask a parent or guardian for help. Start on your right lower belly just above your hip bone. Move your fingers in small, firm circles about 10 times. Keep making these circles as you move up towards your ribs, across to the left side, and then down the left side of your belly. Doing this massage should take a few minutes. Listen out for borborygmus (pronounced bor-bor-ig-mus – one of my favorite words! It’s just a fancy way of saying “stomach gurgling”). Borborygmus is a sign things are moving along!
- Move! If you are moving, your gut is moving too! Try having a dance party or getting some active play in after meals to see if this helps get your body ready to poop.
One last thing, make sure to listen closely to your body for any poop signals it may be sending. Sometimes poop signals feel like a tightening in your bottom or anus (the hole in our bottoms where the poop comes out), sometimes it feels like things moving in your belly and bottom, and sometimes it feels like a small belly ache. If you have been constipated or have had a hard time pooping in the past, your body may only talk to you in whispers. It can be hard to know what it is saying. The more you start looking for these whispers and listening to what you think they may be saying, the more your body will start to give you easy to understand poop signals! Also, if you can go poop close to when these signals are happening, it is SOOOO much easier to go poop and get everything out at once. Keep listening!