Transcript

BAZ MOFFAT

Locating your pelvic floor muscles can be a bit tricky because you can’t see them. So when we ask people to do pelvic floor exercises, they often just squeeze everything. They’ll squeeze their face, they’ll squeeze their tummy, they’ll squeeze their glutes in the hope that their pelvic floor is involved somewhere. But the key is to isolate it, to just work the pelvic floor on its own.

And the best way to do that is when you’re on the loo having a wee, attempt to stop yourself from the flow of urine coming out. Now that is only to isolate it and work out where it is. Don’t do that every single time. And the other exercise is to imagine your passing wind and you don’t want to and to stop yourself from doing that. And those are your pelvic floor muscles, and that’s all you need to do is work out where they are.

So we’re going to do an isolated pelvic floor exercise. Do this in lying or sitting or standing. And the most important thing is to be really relaxed. So I want everyone to relax their tummy, have your feet flat on the floor, relaxed face, and then just imagine your start yourself stopping passing wind and just connect with that part with your anus and close it off, and then relax it.

And then I want you to do the same with your vagina. So you’d close it off and then relax and let go. And you notice that I’m able to talk and I’m doing these exercises, but you shouldn’t notice on the outside that this is happening. And that can often be a lot harder than you think.

So once you’ve worked out that connection, you then want to lift up your vagina towards your belly button, and then relax let go, and then lift up the vagina towards the belly button, and then relax let go. And the relax let go can be as hard as the lift, and it will just take quite a lot of time to get used to doing those.

We get asked all the time, how many exercises women should be doing? And every woman should be doing the basic pelvic floor exercises every single day because they have a pelvic floor. So 10 slow lifts and 10 fast lifts every day.

But that’s not enough for an athlete. That’s not enough for a sportswoman. They need to be making sure that they’re integrating their pelvic floor work into their strength and conditioning, and into their core work. And every trainer and every coach needs to really prioritise getting the pelvic floor onto the gym floor.