Why do I leak with netball?
Train your pelvic floor, hips and glutes
You’re mid-game. You go up for an intercept, land hard, and it happens. That unwelcome leak. You glance around to check nobody noticed, carry on playing, and quietly resolve to wear a pad next time. Sound familiar?
If you play netball and leak urine; during a jump, a sprint, a sudden change of direction, you are far from alone. But here’s what nobody in your netball club is talking about: leaking during sport is common, but it is not normal, and it is absolutely treatable.
How Common Is Urinary Incontinence in Netball Players?
Research published in ScienceDirect looked specifically at club-level netball players and found that nearly 1 in 3 women leaked urine while training or playing netball. Among women who had given birth (parous players), that figure rose to almost 1 in 2. Even among women who had never been pregnant (nulliparous players), the prevalence was 14% – significantly higher than the general population of women the same age.
This matters, because urinary incontinence is often framed as a postnatal or menopausal problem. The data tells a different story: netball, by its very nature, creates a significant challenge for the pelvic floor, regardless of whether you’ve had children.
Why Is Netball So Demanding on the Pelvic Floor?
Netball is a fast-paced, high-impact sport involving repeated jumping, landing, sprinting, stopping, and changing direction, often without warning. Every single one of those actions sends a spike of intra-abdominal pressure (IAP) downwards through your pelvic floor.
Think of the pelvic floor like a trampoline at the base of your pelvis. Every jump, land, and sudden movement sends a force wave through that trampoline. If it’s strong, responsive and well-coordinated, it manages that pressure effectively. If it’s weak, poorly timed, or fatigued, it doesn’t, and you can leak.
In netball specifically, the challenge is not just impact but unpredictability. Unlike running, where the rhythm is consistent, netball demands reactive, explosive movements. Your pelvic floor has to anticipate and respond to sudden pressure spikes, which requires not just strength, but speed, endurance and coordination.
What Does Hip and Lower Limb Strength Have to Do With Leaking?
This is where things get really interesting and where a lot of pelvic floor programmes fall short.
The pelvic floor does not work in isolation. Research has shown that the gluteus maximus, gluteus medius, and hip adductor muscles co-contract with the pelvic floor muscles during movement. Anatomically, this makes sense: the levator ani (a key pelvic floor muscle) connects closely with the obturator internus, which in turn is functionally linked to the hip rotators.
Studies comparing women with and without stress urinary incontinence have found significant weakness in hip external rotators and abductors in those who leak, suggesting that hip strength is not just a nice-to-have, but plays a genuine role in continence.
In netball, if your glutes and hips are not doing their job, absorbing landing forces, stabilising the pelvis during directional change, controlling the limb during a jump shot, that load is displaced further up the chain, directly increasing the pressure on an already challenged pelvic floor.
Landing mechanics matter too. A weak or poorly coordinated lower limb will mean a harder, less controlled landing, and that means a bigger pressure spike with every single rep of every drill, every match, every training session. That adds up.
How Could Better Pelvic Floor, Core, Hip and Glute Training Help?
The good news is that this is a very solvable problem, when it’s addressed properly. “Properly” does not mean a leaflet of Kegel exercises. It means progressive, specific training that treats your pelvic floor like the athletic system it is.
Here’s what evidence-informed training for leaking netball players should include:
1. Pelvic Floor Strength AND Endurance
Your pelvic floor needs to produce force quickly (for that unexpected landing) and sustain it across the entire match. Training should include both fast, reactive contractions and sustained holds, progressing over time in functional positions.
Example exercise: Using youe breath Before you jump or land, practice a short exhale before the impact lands. This can sometimes help lower intra abdominal pressure and possibly leakage during high-impact movements. Start practising it in training: anticipate the landing and feel a contraction of the pelvic floor just before your feet hit the floor. With repetition, this becomes more automatic.
You also try dumbbell catches which help the core and pelvic floor to manage sudden changes to intra abdominal pressure.
You can find the video here
2. Hip and Glute Strengthening — Especially Abductors and External Rotators
Programmes that combine pelvic floor training with targeted hip work have been shown to reduce leakage more effectively than pelvic floor exercise alone. For netball players, this means building capacity in the glutes and hips to absorb force, stabilise the pelvis, and reduce the load transmitted to the pelvic floor.
Example exercise: The Lateral Band Walk Place a resistance band just above your knees. Stand in a slight squat position and take 10–12 controlled steps sideways, keeping your pelvis level and your knees tracking over your toes. Focus on feeling the work in the side of your hip (gluteus medius). This directly trains the hip abductors shown to be weaker in women who experience stress urinary incontinence. Progress by increasing band resistance, adding a squat between each step, or performing the movement on a slightly unstable surface.
3. Integrated Core Training
The pelvic floor is part of your deep core system, working alongside the diaphragm, transversus abdominis and multifidus to manage intra-abdominal pressure. Core training that teaches good breathing mechanics and pressure management, rather than just crunch variations, helps give the pelvic floor the support it needs during high-demand sport.
4. Progressive Exposure to Impact
Ultimately, the goal is to be able to play netball without leaking. That means gradually reintroducing and building tolerance to the specific demands of the sport; jumping, landing, running, changing direction within a structured programme, not just hoping things improve on their own.
The Bottom Line
Leaking during netball is not a badge of honour, a necessary consequence of playing sport, or just “what happens after you’ve had kids.” It is a sign that your pelvic floor and likely your hip and glute system needs more specific, progressive training.
The research is clear: pelvic floor training works, and when combined with hip strengthening, the results are even better. As a netball player, you are already strong, competitive and committed to your sport. You deserve a training programme that matches that commitment and gets you back on court, leak-free.
If you’re leaking during netball and ready to do something about it, get in touch with me, this is exactly what I help women with.
Beth Davies is a pelvic health and strength training specialist working with women experiencing leaking, prolapse, and pelvic floor dysfunction. She offers online programmes and 1:1 coaching designed for active women who want to get back to the sport they love.