Exercise and the Pelvic Floor
We all know that exercise is important to living a balanced and healthy life, managing stress, and feeling good in our day to day lives, but have you ever considered how exercise impacts your pelvic floor?
Everyone has a pelvic floor. It is a group of muscles located at the base of your pelvis, connecting your public bone, tail bone, and sit bones, and supporting the bladder, rectum, urethra, bowels, and uterus or prostate.
Regular exercise can help you build awareness and coordination of your pelvic floor muscles, improve the strength and support, boost pressure management, and enhance blood flow and healing. Not only can exercise help strengthen your muscles, it can help them relax too.
Build Awareness & Coordination
Do you know how to activate your pelvic floor? Most people don’t. The best way to identify the correct muscles is to find one of your sit bones in standing. Then place your hand more inward of that bone – that is pelvic floor muscle. If you try to contract (think of trying to suck up a smoothie with your vagina), you should feel those muscles tense up and lift very slightly. When you relax, you should feel them let go or drop back to their resting state.
This movement cue can help retrain your brain to better understand the signals your pelvic floor is sending by knowing when it is contracted or relaxed.
Improve Strength & Support
The pelvic floor is the base that supports your uterus, rectum, and bladder, and ensures that they are in the correct spot. Weakness in the pelvic floor can cause these organs to slide out of place, or prolapse. It can also cause other issues, such as incontinence and constipation.
By strengthening these muscles, you can prevent and manage prolapses of the uterus, bladder, or rectum, or incontinence.
Boosts Pressure Management
Ideally, the pressure management within the abdomen should happen automatically. The core muscles should work together: the pelvic floor lifts, and the abdominals and back muscles should come in to support the spine, and breathing should be easy. When any of these muscles are damaged in any way, it can cause the pressure to overload the pelvic floor muscles, which can cause more problems over time.
By learning how to coordinate your breathing, abdominal muscles, and pelvic floor muscles, you can help restore pressure management. This can prevent leaking with coughing, sneezing, running, and other daily activities.
Enhances Blood Flow and Healing
Exercise is essential in day to day life, but it can be especially beneficial during healing, whether it be postpartum or post-surgery. Gentle movements, such as walking, yoga, or dynamic stretching, can help to promote blood flow to the injured tissues, which increases oxygen delivery, and helps reduce inflammation.
Returning to exercise postpartum doesn’t mean you have to jump back into the routine you had prior to giving birth. Starting with gentle movement, like 360 degree breathing, lumbar rotations, pelvic tilts and deep core contractions can assist in the early stages of the healing process.
It’s not just about strength, it’s about balance
To work as part of the core, the pelvic floor muscles have to be able to relax, as well as support. If these muscles are constantly tensed to “brace” the spine, it can cause them to become stiff and tight, which can cause pelvic floor issues. Tight pelvic floor muscles can cause issues like urinary urgency and leakage, pain with sex, and difficulty fully emptying your bladder.
Whether your pelvic floor muscles need help to relax, or to strengthen, pelvic floor physical therapy can help.
Read more about V Strong Physical Therapy, and learn how pelvic floor physical therapy can benefit you. Book a consult call with our team to get started on your pelvic health journey today!
Works Cited
Cleveland Clinic. “Kegel Exercises: How to and & Benefits.” Cleveland Clinic, 1 Feb. 2023, my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/14611-kegel-exercises.
Cleveland Clinic. “Pelvic Floor Muscles: Anatomy, Function & Conditions.” Cleveland Clinic, 13 Apr. 2022, my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/22729-pelvic-floor-muscles.
“Five Exercises to Strengthen Your Pelvic Floor | UT Health San Antonio MD Anderson Cancer Center.” Cancer.uthscsa.edu, 4 Jan. 2024, cancer.uthscsa.edu/news-and-stories/five-exercises-strengthen-your-pelvic-floor.
“The Pelvic Floor and Core · the Pelvic Floor · Pelvic Floor First.” Pelvic Floor First, www.pelvicfloorfirst.org.au/pages/the-pelvic-floor-and-core.html.