The pelvic floor muscles help us control our posture and urinary and bowel movements. As we age, our pelvic floor naturally weakens, and this is compounded by pregnancy and childbirth. A strong pelvic floor can help counteract issues like incontinence (involuntary peeing, like when you have a powerful sneeze). How to keep your pelvic floor healthy isn't hard, due to the location of muscles, less is more when doing pelvic floor exercises.
What Is Pelvic Floor Therapy?
Pelvic floor therapy is one of the ways you can keep your pelvic floor healthy and involves contracting and relaxing the muscles of the pelvic floor in order to build strength, just like any other type of strength training. The trick here is targeting the right places with your exercises, as your pelvic floor isn’t the easiest body part to identify. It’s essentially a hammock or bowl-shaped set of muscles at the bottom of the pelvis that supports and surrounds the uterus, anus, and bladder. With such important contents, you can see why it’s important to keep your pelvic floor at top-notch performance!
How to Find Your Pelvic Floor Muscles
Just clenching up your butt muscles is not a good way to work out your pelvic floor, though that’s close to the basic idea. There are a couple of methods you can use to identify exactly which muscles you’ll want to focus on.
6 Pelvic Floor Physical Therapy Exercises to Strengthen and Tighten
Though these exercises are made for beginners, it’s important to note that you shouldn’t go all out right away. Physiotherapist Renata Nunes tells her clients that “muscle training should have a frequency and intensity, from the easiest to the hardest, starting in a gravitational position and progressing to an anti-gravitational position.” This is because you can actually strain your pelvic floor muscles by pushing them too hard and too fast.
Physical therapist Cathy Stedman adds that “these muscles do need rest breaks, especially from firing at higher intensities. When training/exercising your pelvic floor muscles, make sure the exercises are pain-free and that there is just as much of a focus on relaxing these muscles after contracting them.”
The team at hellorory.com very generously allowed me to share this infographic with pelvic floor exercises you can try on how to keep your pelvic floor healthy:
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