What if I told you that three minutes a day, three times a week could improve your sex life and improve or prevent bladder leakage? You may never have heard of your pelvic floor before, but keeping it fit is a crucial part of women’s fitness that many women are neglecting without realizing the consequences. Let’s discuss why every woman should improve her pelvic floor fitness.
For women who suffer from pelvic floor dysfunctions like pelvic organ prolapse, treatment may involve physical therapy with a fitness device or medication. It’s recommended to consult a pelvic floor physiotherapist for pelvic floor problems. The physiotherapist can teach you the right kind of Kegels and other exercises to help train your pelvic floor muscles to better support your organs and prevent urinary leakage and recommend other effective treatment options.
The Role of the PC Muscle
Before we continue our discussion of pelvic floor fitness, we need to discuss the difference between the pelvic floor and the PC muscle. The pelvic floor consists of muscles, ligaments, nerves, and connective tissue. This structure supports your vagina, uterus, bladder, and rectum. One of the muscles in your pelvic floor is the PC (PuboCoccygeus) muscle. This muscle stretches from your coccyx (tailbone) to your pubic bone.
Causes of Poor Pelvic Floor Fitness
While having a baby is one of the primary causes of a weak PC muscle, it isn’t the only cause. Other factors that can affect your pelvic floor fitness include obesity, chronic constipation, heavy lifting, and aging. These can all weaken the pelvic floor and lead to urinary or fecal incontinence or worse, pelvic organ prolapse. No thank you!
How Many Women Are Affected?
More than one-third of women in the United States suffer from some form of pelvic floor disorder (PFD). That’s a lot of women leaking urine. Women are also affected because the uterus descending into the vagina, or suffering other complications of a weak pelvic floor. No mama needs that!
How can you locate your PC muscle?
If you’re unfamiliar with your PC muscle, you may be wondering how to locate it. The most common way to locate your PC muscle is to stop your urine flow halfway through. It’s not necessarily healthy to stop your urine flow, but there are other ways to figure out what it feels like to use your PC muscle.
You know that feeling you get when you sense you’ve just started your period, and you squeeze your vagina to try to keep everything inside as you rush to a bathroom? That’s your PC muscle that you’re engaging.
Benefits of Having a Strong Pelvic Floor
Possibly the most important benefit of having a strong pelvic floor is the reduced likelihood of developing urinary incontinence. If you already deal with urinary incontinence, strengthening your pelvic floor may reduce your symptoms.
Strengthening your pelvic floor can also improve the strength of your abdominal and lower back muscles since it’s connected to them, so pelvic floor fitness should be considered a crucial part of your overall fitness routine.
If you’re planning on having a baby, a strong pelvic floor can help prevent common side effects of pregnancy like incontinence and back pain. In addition, having a strong PC muscle can help the birthing process go more smoothly.
How to Improve Pelvic Floor Fitness
For many decades, the gold standard of pelvic floor fitness was doing kegel exercises with or without tools like kegel balls or weights. These are a good place to start if you’re unfamiliar with your PC muscle and how to exercise it, but static resistance can only strengthen your pelvic floor so much.
If you’re serious about improving your pelvic floor fitness, you should consider using a device with increasing resistance. To strengthen other muscles, you gradually increase the weights you lift to keep strengthening the muscle. Why shouldn’t that be the case for strengthening your PC muscle?
Using a pelvic floor fitness device for a few minutes a day three times a week is all you need to strengthen your PC muscle and improve your pelvic floor. Even the busiest of women can find ten minutes spread over the course of an entire week for such an important exercise.
Final thoughts
In conclusion, it’s not only crucial to improve your pelvic floor fitness, but it’s easier than you expect. Ten minutes a week can reduce bladder incontinence and improve your sex life – who wouldn’t want that?
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