How much should you hold your pelvic floor muscles during everyday activitites?
Are you supposed to think about them?
Or should you just let them do their own thing?
- First, ask yourself if you are a naturally tense or relaxed person?
- Then consider whether your pelvic floor muscles have fully recovered after childbirth? And that question includes those of you had your babies many moons ago!
- Do your pelvic floor and tummy abdominal muscles feel like they support your internal organs and your back as you go about your day?
- Or do they have a tendency to droop when you aren’t paying them attention?
Pelvic floor muscles should work on automatic pilot – going up and down through a variety of gears and level changes without you having to think too hard about it.
However, many pelvic floors have a tendency to either “waft about”. Or grip like mad all the time.
More sophistication is needed
Even if you have been religious about using Squeezy App and doing your daily pelvic floor targeted exercises. You may have one more step to go. Making sure that your pelvic floor joins in more when you do more and knows how to relax when you relax.
Just like your abdominals and all the other muscles of your body your pelvic floor is not a one gear, one trick pony.
We have moved on from the concept of “on” or “off”.
We now realise that your brain needs to decide at any given moment how much muscle activity is “enough” for the task you want to do.
A well trained and exercised pelvic floor can automatically choose to be completely relaxed OR fully sharp and contracted. With plenty of medium level options in between.
What is your Resting Tone??
Resting tone is the amount of activity your muscles have at rest. Where they sit naturally when you are not thinking about them.
Too Little Tone:
Untrained muscles, or muscles after childbirth or an episode of injury, can have terribly low resting tone. Rather like this poor mama….
Low toned muscles leave us “hanging off our ligaments” with a tendency to overstretch joints and muscles into saggy patterns.
This has obvious cosmetic fallout. However, you will also have difficult stabilising movement (getting weird joint clicks and clunks), or be vulnerable to injury.
Un-toned or low-toned muscles are responsible for issues like incontinence, bladder urgency, difficulty emptying bowels and pelvic organ prolapse.
Too High Tone:
Or do you relate more to this fine woman – fired up & alert, all the time ??!
Too much muscle tension has you perched on the edge of your seat, tense glutes, shoulders up, neck muscles tight like guitar strings – leading to neck pain, shoulder aches and pelvic pain.
Sometimes also responsibe for incontinence, urgency and difficulty emptying bowels too. I know seems weird! But too MUCH pelvic floor tone can be a problem as well as too little!
VIDEO: grading pelvic floor control in standing, carrying, reaching and JUMPING!
Today’s video was made last year, in collaboration with Tena. This is part of a series teaching pelvic floor from basics to more advanced. A Pelvic Floor Exercises 101!
Find the whole Pelvic Floor 101 sequence HERE.
In this video, experiment with me and the lovely models as we explore finding our pelvic floors and controlling how much they work – even as we move handweights and try a bit of stretching & leaping too. It takes practice to improve your “automatic pilot” function for every day life.
So lovely ladies. Pelvic Floor Muscles for Real Life. No pelvic floors just wafting about! Practice. Standing up. Add some hand weights. Stretching.
And if you want to get running or on that trampoline you gotta join those lovely ladies as they practice JUMPING too (video above) !!
