Pelvis, no Elvis

Recently I went to a workshop on Pilates for pelvic floor health.  Nearly all of us will have some pelvic floor issues at some point in our lives, so it was a practical decision.  I learned tons and my clients will be seeing little sneaky things creeping into their workouts to keep everything functioning smoothly (and drily!) as we go forward.  However, there are two things we all can do to improve our function that have nothing to do with kegels.

 

The first thing we can do is, surprisingly, to breathe deeply.  Deep inhales and exhales into the abdomen allow the pelvic floor to contract completely and then relax completely.  Muscles that are held too tightly or too loosely are weak muscles.  Teaching muscles to contract and relax allows us to create the optimal amount of tension for whatever we happen to be doing.  So what do I mean by deep breathing?  We need to inhale so that the breath fills our torsos from the bottom up and then empties the same way.  That’s it.  We may not be able to concentrate on breathing that way all the time, but even a few minutes of attention to the breath a couple of times a day will help.  (Bonus:  we get mindfulness points for this!)

 

The second thing we can do is to strengthen our deep abdominal muscles.  Most of us spend a lot of time focusing on the surface ones (the rectus abdominis) because those are the ones that make the six-pack look.  However, looks aren’t everything.  Below the rectus, we have the transversus abdominis, which runs across the body from side to side.  That’s the one we need to befriend in order to improve our function (not only for pelvic floor, but for all kinds of daily activities!).  When we hear (or use) cues like drawing our belly buttons to our spines, we are recruiting our rectus abdominis.  Instead, to wake up our transversus, we can think about all the stuff in our abdomens and imagine that we are shrink-wrapping it.  That feeling of pulling all those squishy bits together is our transversus working.  We can, of course, do this during our workouts, but we can also take a moment every once in a while during the day to do it all by itself (or maybe we can do it when we do our breathing?  Too organized?  Probably not.).

 

Try it out and let me know what you think!