5 Ways to Strengthen Your Pelvic Floor
When we’re talking about strengthening our pelvic floor, what we really want to do is engage the muscles and get them to connect with the rest of the body so that movement, coughing, sneezing and sudden changes of direction don’t overload them causing them to be unable to do their job.
Remember - the pelvic floor muscles hold the internal pelvic organs up in place and maintain appropriate control of the neck of the bladder, vaginal wall and rectum to control the flow of all the things that go in and out of those openings. In the image above the pelvic floor muscles (PFM) are shown in pink and the muscles most affected by childbirth are highlighted in red.
So here’s 5 of many ways you can work on strengthening those super important muscles:
1) Learn to do a good, effective pelvic floor muscle contraction, or kegel:
For many women I speak to about PFME (pelvic floor muscles exercises) the comment comes back - well I have no idea if I’m actually doing it right! And we know from studies that while 60% of women don’t know where their PF muscles are, for those who are doing their exercises, 80% of them don’t do them correctly without supervision. Often leaflets are given out in maternity wards or a health visitor/Dr says “and you’re doing your PF muscles exercises aren’t you?” with no guidance.
So here’s the best tip I can give - bring your back passage towards your front passage and then draw up through the middle.
I also often cue to “imagine sucking spaghetti up through your back passage”, or “pick up a blueberry with your vagina”. Otherwise if you want a great situational image try this: “imagine you are in a crowded lift and you feel the need to fart, but instead you hold it!!”
2) Co-Ordinate your breathing with your pelvic floor contraction:
Those cues above will be a million times more effective if you take a good, relaxed breath in and then through your breath out you engage and do the contraction. Don’t hold your breath while you work the PF muscles, this will create tension and mean you can’t get the full release and engage you want.
3) Breathe In and Release:
For many, many of us our pelvic floor muscles are a little overactive and have a hard time releasing completely, which means we are then unable to get a good contraction because the muscles are already switched on.
When we breathe in, we want to release the pelvic floor by allowing it to relax, the breathing diaphragm and the pelvic floor are then working in concert together. From that full relax you can then do a full contraction so see if you can work on taking your time to breathe in fully and feel it draw all the way down into the base of your pelvis.
4) Hinge Over, Stand and Contract
Once you’ve sorted the good engagement of the PFM and the breath in and release you can apply it to movement, and what movement do Mums do a million times a day? Bending over to pick things up, load the dishwasher, tidy and pick small people up! So we can make that movement - hinging over from the hips and standing back up again - into a pelvic floor exercise.
Breathe in as you hinge over - making sure you move at the hip joints and not too much in the middle of the back - releasing/lengthening your PFM as you do so, and then stand upright again moving at the hips and engage the pelvic floor on a breath out.
Then you have PFME in action 100 times a day without a Kegel in sight!
5) Release your shoulders!
Whilst the shoulders are not directly connected to the pelvic floor muscles, they are down the line of the connective tissue or fascia and we know that tension in the jaw, throat, mouth and/or shoulders will directly affect the pelvic floor by creating tension as well.
If you think of it like this - when you gasp or inhale sharply in anxiety and lift your shoulders to your ears, also straining the muscles at the front of your neck, that same lift happens all the way down your body, lifting your ribs and your pelvic floor too. Unless we can let that go and relax again we would then be in a permanent state of tension through those areas of the body.
Instead we want to aim to breathe under the shoulders without them getting involved. Your ribcage needs to expand on the breath in without the shoulders raising and then the ribs drop on the breath out again without the shoulders getting involved.
When you do this, the pelvic floor can connect with the breathing diaphragm without anything else getting involved and then can strengthen in the most effective way possible.
From these top tips I hope you can understand that we are aiming to set the pelvic floor up for most effective connection - breathe well, engage correctly and let go of the shoulders, then move through your daily life working your pelvic floor as you go.
