6 Strong to the core: training the pelvic floor

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The image shows two females, one of which is lying on her back with her knees bent and other one has one hand behind the back of the female lying down and the other one her knee. She is teaching the female how to train her pelvic floor muscles.

One of the challenges many women encounter when doing any pelvic floor exercises is that it’s not obvious where they are, or what exercises they should be doing.

In Activity 3 Baz Moffat of The Well HQ [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , who has taught thousands of women to train their pelvic floor muscles, will instruct you on how you should approach them.

Activity 3 A little effort for a big gain

Timing: Allow about 20 minutes

Watch the video below where Baz Moffat will help you to locate your pelvic floor muscles and then show you how to train the muscles for strength and endurance.

Once you have watched the video write down your early impressions of completing these exercises.

Download this video clip.Video player: boc_sfps_1_session4_activity3.mp4

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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.

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Discussion

Your initial impression might be that it can be surprising how difficult the exercises are to do correctly because they involve subtle, small movements. As Baz says there is a tendency to just contract everything and even screw up your face with the effort involved, but it is essential not to engage other muscles. It was important that Baz stressed that they should be done every day and at least 10 lifts to be done slowly and 10 lifts to be done quickly. This will ensure all muscle fibres are worked as the pelvic floor contain both slow twitch muscle fibres (for endurance) and fast twitch muscle fibres (for strength and power).

It is important to reinforce the message from Baz that locating the pelvic floor muscles by practicing stopping the flow of urine or from stopping yourself breaking wind must only be used as a technique to reassure yourself that you are using the correct muscles.

The reason that we should not use this technique regularly is that our pelvic floors are designed to relax while emptying our bowels and bladder. If we do the opposite of relaxing the muscles by contracting them it can confuse the neural pathways between the brain and the bladder and bowels. This can lead to problems in the future, such as an inability to completely empty your bladder that can increase your risk of a urinary tract infection.