The device is not the training. It is the feedback.
A clear look at what smart pelvic floor trainers really give you, what they do not, and how to decide before you spend $150 or more.
Quick answer
Pelvic floor trainers like the Elvie Trainer and Perifit are worth it for a specific mum: one who cannot tell whether she is squeezing correctly, or who knows what to do but never actually does it. They do not strengthen anything by themselves. The strengthening comes from pelvic floor muscle training, which is well supported by research and costs nothing to perform. The device adds biofeedback, which shows you on a screen what your muscles are doing.
If you can already feel a lift and a release, your money usually goes further on a structured programme, or on one session with a women's health physiotherapist who can check your technique by examination. At the time of writing the Elvie Trainer lists at $199 and the Perifit Care at $149, while a written guided plan such as the Mumma Glow bundle is a one-time $50.
Elvie Trainer list price, one-time, no subscription
Perifit Care list price (often discounted)
Minimum supervised training programme NICE recommends before reassessing
What a pelvic floor trainer actually does
A smart pelvic floor trainer is a small, body-safe insert with pressure sensors. It pairs with a phone app over Bluetooth. When you contract, the app responds in real time, usually as a moving bar, a rising graph or a little game. When you relax, it drops back down.
That is the whole mechanism. It is a mirror for a muscle group you cannot see. The clinical word for it is biofeedback.
What it does not do is contract the muscle for you. These are not electrical stimulation units and they are not passive toners. Every repetition is one you perform. So the honest way to think about the purchase is not "will this fix my pelvic floor" but "will seeing the number make me train better, and train more often".
For a lot of mums the answer is genuinely yes, and the reason is not motivation. It is accuracy. Research and clinical practice both point to the same problem: a meaningful share of women asked to do a pelvic floor contraction actually bear down instead, or recruit their glutes and inner thighs and call it a squeeze. If that is you, you can do a hundred repetitions a day and get nowhere, or make symptoms worse. We covered why that happens in more detail in our guide to why kegels alone often are not enough.
Elvie Trainer: what it does well
Credit where it is due. Elvie built the category, and the hardware is the most polished thing in it.
- Directional sensing. This is the feature that matters most and the one that justifies the price gap. The Elvie Trainer distinguishes a lift from a downward push. If you bear down instead of lifting, the app tells you. Nothing else in the consumer market flags that mistake as clearly, and it is exactly the mistake that undoes people's training.
- Genuinely good app design. Short guided sessions, a clear progression, and metrics that are readable rather than clinical.
- No subscription. You pay once. In a market drifting toward monthly fees, that deserves saying out loud.
- Removable cover. It ships with a sleeve so the device suits different anatomies, which improves the sensor reading rather than just comfort.
The trade-off is the price. At $199 it is the most expensive way into home biofeedback, and it is a single-purpose object. Once your technique is reliable, most mums stop reaching for it.
Perifit: what it does well
Perifit takes a different route. Instead of polishing the metrics, it turns the session into a game you steer with your pelvic floor.
- Two pressure sensors. The design aims to separate a true pelvic floor lift from abdominal pressure, which is a reasonable answer to the same accuracy problem Elvie solves with direction sensing.
- Gamified sessions. You guide a bird or similar character by contracting and relaxing. It sounds gimmicky. It is not. The single biggest failure point in pelvic floor training is that people stop after three weeks, and a five minute game is easier to repeat than a five minute chore.
- Lower entry price. The Perifit Care lists at $149 and is frequently discounted below that, which makes it the more sensible first device if you are unsure the format suits you.
The trade-off is that the experience is built around the game loop, so the raw feedback is less granular than Elvie's, and a game can distract from the quality of the contraction if you start chasing the score.
What the research actually says about biofeedback
This is where honest guides and marketing pages part company.
The strong finding is about the exercise, not the gadget. Pelvic floor muscle training is recommended as a first-line treatment for stress urinary incontinence in women, and a Cochrane systematic review of pelvic floor muscle training for urinary incontinence (Dumoulin and colleagues, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2018) supports it as an effective conservative treatment. The UK's NICE guideline NG123 recommends a supervised pelvic floor muscle training programme of at least 16 weeks as a first-line option. The NHS advises pelvic floor exercises for all women during and after pregnancy, and notes that improvement typically takes a few months of consistent practice rather than a few days.
The weaker finding is about adding a device. A Cochrane review of biofeedback added to pelvic floor muscle training (Herderschee and colleagues, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2011) found that women who received biofeedback alongside training often did better than those doing training alone, but the reviewers were careful to note a confounder: the biofeedback groups usually also had more contact time with a clinician. It is not clear how much of the benefit belongs to the sensor and how much belongs to the extra guidance.
Read plainly, that means a home trainer is a plausible aid, not a proven upgrade. Results vary from mum to mum. If a device is what gets you doing the training consistently and correctly, it has earned its price. If you would have trained anyway, the evidence does not promise you a better outcome for the extra $149 to $199.
Side by side: device or guided programme
| What you get | Elvie Trainer | Perifit Care | Mumma Glow guides |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | $199 one-time | $149 one-time | $15 single guide, $50 full bundle, one-time |
| Tells you if you are squeezing correctly | Yes, including bearing-down alerts | Yes, via dual sensors | No, written cues and self-checks only |
| Structured week-by-week plan | App progression | Game levels | Yes, written plan you keep |
| Covers core, glutes and posture too | No | No | Yes |
| Subscription required | No | No | No |
| Best for | Mums who cannot feel the contraction and want the clearest technique check at home | Mums who know what to do but never stick with it | Mums who can feel it and want structure and full-body recovery at the lowest cost |
$199
$149
$50
$15
Source: Elvie and Perifit published list prices and mummaglow.com, checked August 2026. Retail promotions change frequently.
Who should buy a device, and who should not
A trainer is probably worth it if: you place a hand where you were told to and feel nothing at all; you have been doing kegels for months with no change; you suspect you are pushing down rather than lifting; or you are honest with yourself that a screen and a streak are the only reason you will do this daily.
A trainer is probably not worth it if: you can clearly feel a lift and a full release; your main issue is that you have no plan rather than no feedback; you are still in the first six weeks after birth and have not had your postnatal check; or the $150 to $200 would be better spent on an actual assessment.
That last point deserves emphasis. A single appointment with a women's health physiotherapist gives you something no consumer device can: a trained clinician confirming by examination what your muscles are doing, and screening for the things a sensor cannot see, such as pelvic organ prolapse or a significant abdominal separation. If you are unsure what that appointment involves, we walk through it in what happens at a postpartum pelvic floor physio appointment. In many cases that hour is the single highest-value purchase in this whole category.
The verdict
Smart pelvic floor trainers are legitimate tools, not snake oil, and both Elvie and Perifit are honest products that do what they claim. But they solve one narrow problem: knowing whether you are contracting correctly. If that is your problem, buy one, and buy the Elvie if you can stretch to it because the bearing-down alert is the feature that actually protects you.
If your problem is that you have no plan, no progression and no idea how the pelvic floor connects to your breathing, your core and your return to running, a device will sit in a drawer by week four. Spend a fraction of the money on a structured plan instead, and put the rest toward a physio appointment.
The affordable, one-time option
Mumma Glow is not a device and does not pretend to be. It is a set of written postpartum recovery guides you buy once and keep, covering pelvic floor, deep core, glutes and energy, with no subscription and no app to keep paying for. The full Complete Postpartum Body Reset bundle is a one-time $50, which is less than a third of the price of most smart trainers. Use code GLOW20 for 20% off. Results vary from mum to mum.
Frequently asked questions
Do pelvic floor trainers actually work?
The training works. Pelvic floor muscle training is a recommended first-line treatment for stress urinary incontinence, per NICE guideline NG123 and a Cochrane review by Dumoulin and colleagues in 2018. The device adds biofeedback so you can see what you are doing. Evidence that biofeedback improves outcomes over training alone is mixed, partly because women using biofeedback in trials also had more clinician contact. So a trainer is best understood as an accuracy and consistency aid, not a treatment in itself.
Is the Elvie Trainer better than Perifit?
They are good at different things. The Elvie Trainer gives the clearest technique feedback, including alerting you when you bear down instead of lifting, and it costs more at $199. Perifit Care is cheaper at $149 and turns sessions into a game, which suits mums whose real barrier is sticking with it. If you genuinely cannot tell whether you are contracting correctly, Elvie's directional sensing is the more useful feature.
When can I start using a pelvic floor trainer after birth?
Gentle pelvic floor exercises without any device can usually begin within days of a vaginal birth once it is comfortable, and the NHS encourages them. Anything inserted vaginally is different. Wait until bleeding has stopped, any tearing or stitches have healed, and you have been cleared at your postnatal check, which is around six weeks in most systems. If you had a third or fourth degree tear, a caesarean with complications, or any ongoing pain, ask your GP, midwife or physiotherapist first.
Do I need a device if I already know how to do a pelvic floor contraction?
Usually not. If you can feel a distinct lift and, just as importantly, a complete release, the device is confirming something you already know. Your limiting factor at that point is programming: how many, how often, how to progress, and how to combine pelvic floor work with breathing and deep core work. That is what a structured plan gives you, and it costs far less.
Are cheap kegel balls or weights the same thing?
No. Weighted balls give you resistance and a vague sensation, but no information. They cannot tell you whether you lifted or pushed down, which is the error most worth catching. They also encourage holding tension, and plenty of postpartum pelvic floors are already too tight rather than too weak. If your budget is limited, a plan plus a physio assessment beats weights.
Leaking, heaviness and a core that will not switch on are all connected, and none of them are solved by squeezing harder. If you leak on a sneeze or a cough, start with why you leak when you sneeze after birth. If it has been going on for months, our guide to how long postpartum incontinence lasts sets realistic expectations. And if your belly and pelvic floor issues arrived together, that is not a coincidence, as we explain in the pelvic floor and diastasis recti connection and in what intra-abdominal pressure means postpartum.
Sources: NHS, pelvic floor exercises guidance. NICE guideline NG123, Urinary incontinence and pelvic organ prolapse in women: management. Dumoulin C and colleagues, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2018. Herderschee R and colleagues, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2011. Elvie and Perifit published list prices, checked August 2026.
This article is general education, not medical advice, and Mumma Glow is not affiliated with Elvie, Perifit or any device manufacturer named here. Prices are checked at the time of writing and change. Results vary from mum to mum. Please speak to your GP, midwife or a women's health physiotherapist about your own recovery, especially if you have pain, heaviness, or symptoms that are getting worse.