1. "It's working well enough now"
This is the most common one, and the most understandable. The pad is dry more often. You got through a supermarket trip without thinking about it. So the training slips from daily to most days to whenever you remember.
The problem is that "well enough" was measured against your worst weeks. It wasn't measured against a normal Tuesday, or a bad cold, or a heavy week in the garden. The muscle that got you to good is the same muscle that has to hold you there when the demands go up.
Getting past it: don't stop, shrink. Cut to one short set a day and keep it. A small daily habit survives a busy month. A big daily habit that you abandon does not. You can always build back up once the busy month is over.
2. "Nothing has changed, so it isn't working"
Three or four weeks in, many men feel exactly the same as they did on day one. That is not evidence of failure. Early on, most of what changes is your control and your coordination — whether you can find the muscle, hold it steadily, and let it go properly. None of that shows up as a drier pad yet.
The other issue is memory. You are comparing today to a vague idea of last month. Vague ideas are unreliable, and they lean pessimistic when you're tired of the whole business.
Getting past it: write something down once a week. Pads used. Number of leaks you noticed. Whether you made it from the car to the front door. One line, same day each week. In six weeks you'll have something real to compare against instead of a feeling.
3. "I keep forgetting, so I've clearly lost the thread"
A man misses two days, feels he's ruined it, and quietly stops. The missed days weren't the problem. The verdict he passed on himself afterwards was.
Training is not a streak. Missing Wednesday does not undo Monday and Tuesday. Nothing you built is deleted. The muscle doesn't know what day it is.
Getting past it: attach the sets to something fixed that already happens — the kettle, the car seat, brushing your teeth. And decide in advance what a missed day means: it means you do the next one. That's all.
4. "I'm doing them and it's making the leaking worse"
Sometimes it genuinely does feel worse for a stretch. Usually that's a sign of overdoing it — squeezing too hard, holding too long, going too often, or never fully relaxing between reps. A tired, overworked pelvic floor is not a strong one. It can leave you feeling heavy, achy, and less in control than before.
The fix is almost always less, not more. Shorter holds. Fewer reps. A proper, deliberate release after each squeeze — the letting go matters as much as the squeeze. Then build back slowly.
If there is pain, blood, fever, or a sudden change in how you're passing urine, that isn't a training question. Ring your doctor and get it looked at.
5. "I'm too old for this to make a difference"
Men in their sixties and seventies say this often, usually with a shrug that suggests they've already decided. It's worth separating two things: what you can change and what you can't. You can't change your age. You can change how well you use a muscle that has probably had very little deliberate attention in your life.
Muscle responds to being asked to work. That doesn't stop at a birthday. Improvement may be slower than it would have been at forty, and it may not go as far, but slower is not the same as none.
Getting past it: pick one specific situation you'd like to handle better — standing up from the armchair, the walk to the car, the first cough of the morning. Train for that. A narrow, concrete goal is far more motivating at any age than "get better".
6. "Six weeks in, I've plateaued"
Progress in the first weeks is often quick, because you are learning to find and use something you couldn't reliably reach before. Then it flattens. That flattening feels like a wall, and a lot of men stop at the wall.
It usually isn't a wall. It's the point where basic squeezes have taught you all they can, and the work needs to change shape. That means training in the positions and moments where you actually leak — standing, walking, rising from a chair, before a cough or a lift — rather than lying down doing the same set you did in week one.
Getting past it: change one variable. Do your sets standing instead of sitting. Add a brace before the things that catch you out. Hold a little longer, or do a few quick, sharp squeezes instead of long ones. New demand, new progress.
7. "I'm embarrassed and I'd rather not think about it"
This one rarely gets said out loud, but it stops more men than any of the others. Doing the training means admitting, several times a day, that you have a problem. Some days it's easier to not think about it at all — and stopping is the fastest way to not think about it.
That's a real cost, and it's worth naming rather than pretending it isn't there. It's also worth noticing that avoidance is expensive too. Cancelled plans, planning routes around toilets, and sitting near the aisle all take up more of your head than a few minutes of training does.
Getting past it: make the training invisible. Nobody can see it. Do it in the car, in a meeting, in the queue. It doesn't need to be a ceremony or a moment of reflection. It's maintenance, like anything else you do for your body, and it can be as unremarkable as you want it to be.
8. "I've had a bad week, so what's the point"
A run of good days followed by a leaky, demoralising week makes the whole effort look pointless. It isn't. Bladder control varies with sleep, illness, alcohol, constipation, stress, and how much you've been on your feet. A bad week is usually a week with reasons in it, not proof that the training failed.
The men who keep improving are not the ones who never have bad weeks. They're the ones who don't treat a bad week as a verdict.
So the practical move is small and unglamorous: look for what was different — sleep, drinks, a heavy day, a cold — and then do the next set anyway. Progress over months is made up of a lot of ordinary days and a few bad ones you kept going through. Decide now what you'll do the next time a bad week arrives, so you're not deciding it while you're fed up.