Q. I’d like to offer a bit of advice for men whose enlarged prostates sometimes make urination difficult: Exercise when you need to go.
For instance, if you live in a two-story house, and wake up in the middle of the night to find urination difficult, walk downstairs and then walk back up. Within a few seconds, your heart rate will go up and urination will become easy.
I’m not sure what the relationship is between increased heart rate and increased ability to urinate. Regardless, it works for me, and so far I’ve not found a doctor who was aware of this.
A. Thanks for the great tip for this very common and distressing problem. We found a number of studies suggesting that exercise during the day might reduce nighttime urinary symptoms. In one study, men who did tai chi exercises significantly improved their urinary symptoms (Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, online Oct. 3, 2011).
Men who spend less time just sitting without moving much seem to have a lower risk of prostate enlargement (International Neurology Journal, Sept., 2014). In fact, they may be at lower risk of a number of conditions. We discussed the benefits of moving around, even if it isn’t exercising, with researcher James A. Levine, MD, PhD, author of Move a Little, Lose a Lot.
