Top 3 Pelvic Floor Exercises for Health
Today we are going to talk about the importance of pelvic floor exercises.
My client came in with a raging case of diastasis, which is the abnormal separation of your abdominal wall. She had her children a long time ago, indicating that her pelvic floor was imbalanced. Here are the top 3 exercises I gave her to help with her pelvic floor.
You are starting with the famous Butt Ball. All you have to do is sit on it. If you can't get down to the floor, that's okay; do it sitting in a chair. That's probably more ideal because you can have your knees bent and your feet flat on the floor before you. The ball should sit smack dab in the center of your pelvis like you’re laying an egg. You should feel the pubic bone hanging off the front, the tailbone off the back, and your pelvis draping off the sides. Breathe and yield into the tension of the ball.
Sometimes your body will fight against the ball's tension, especially if you have any tightness. That’s known as a hypertonic pelvic floor. Very common among fitness professionals. If you are a fitness pro, Pilates, GYROTONIC®, yoga teacher, strength trainer, or CrossFitter, you probably gravitate towards a hypertonic pelvic floor. So you breathe and hang out on the ball to create a supple pelvic floor. The base of your pelvis is similar to an interchange of a superhighway. Your fascial lines interchange up the front and back of your body. Since the interchange is at the bottom of your pelvis, it's nice to give a couple of extra lanes of traffic where they all intersect and then go up the other side.
2. Grab your chair and a half foam roller. Grab the Workout Kit in the store if you don't have an HFR. Sit in a firm chair like a dining room chair on the flat side of the HFR. Tilt the HFR to rock the rocking horse a bit forward so there's a slant toward the front edge of your seat. That position rocks your pelvis like a rolling pin rolling forward. Check that your hip bones are slightly closer to your thigh bones, and stack your pelvis vertically.
For pelvic floor health, we want our pelvis to be vertical and stacked upright. Unfortunately, most chairs rock our pelvises backward. When we sit in a seat, we're almost always tucked under. I started taking pictures of all the chairs and seats I found around town, and they almost all slope towards the backrest. Almost all of them! So unless you have a perfectly flat and level chair, it’s just the nature of it over time. That positioning pulls on the lumbar and does not optimize your pelvic floor health. If you think of your pelvic floor, it's like a tube, and you want it to be stacked vertically.
3. Breathing. Go into a cat/quadruped position and breathe like you say, “Ha.” In yoga, it is the ujjayi breath; in GYROTONIC®, it's the ocean breath, and it’s similar to when you fog glass, go to clean your glasses, or check your breath. It’s a “ha” sound. Try a prolonged exhale, and at the tail end, you will feel the fibers of the abdominals contracting. You're not manually contracting, but you can feel the connection when you're empty. My back, ribs, and bones are still.
Check that you’re not gripping, recruiting the pelvic floor, tightening, or bearing down. When your exhale is empty, feel the abdominal fibers coming together or your reflexive core. Regarding the importance of your pelvic floor health, you want a reflexive core. We want a supple pelvic floor, neutral pelvis alignment, and a reflexive pelvic core so that your pelvic floor can operate adequately.
4. Release your abdomen. On your hands and knees (cat position), let your abdominals go. An actual stomach release. This can feel awful to some people because many are told to suck in their bellies for aesthetic reasons. From a functional standpoint, it's not great. You want to let the belly hang out. Without sucking your belly in, take a deep breath and try the “ha” breathing to feel what happens to the belly. When you're empty, you can feel all these tissues contracting.
Pelvic floor exercises are essential to help hold your organs in, bathrooming, and birthing. To do these functions, they need to be supple and reflexive. Sitting on the butt ball helps the hypertonic fitness pros. Next, sit on the half foam roller to have good pelvis alignment while sitting. Then the third is to fire up the reflexive core for the pelvic floor reflexively to kick on. Notice I never mentioned Kegels. I never had you think about recruiting the pelvic floor tightening. That imaginary elevator that we use to teach? Throw it out the window. All you need to do is breathe, then that H-A “ha” breathing. It's a little more dynamic, and you can feel the fibers of the abdominal wall contract, and then your pelvic floor naturally kicks on too.
Hopefully, that helps, but that pelvic floor is essential. Let's keep it healthy!