Pelvic Floor

What is Pelvic floor?

Pelvic floor muscles are the muscles supporting your bladder, vagina or penis, and back passage. Strengthening your pelvic floor muscles can help stop incontinence, treat prolapse, and make sex better, too. Both men and women can benefit from doing pelvic floor exercises.

Understanding and Engaging Pelvic floor muscle

You have a front and back wall of pelvic floor muscles. To engage or get an idea of why these muscles are, try to stop the flow of urine when you go to the toilet. This will engage muscles of the front wall. It is not recommended to try and stop the flow of urine midstream as this can harm your bladder function.

Pelvic floor exercises are generally prescribed in case a patient suffers with incontinence, Pelvic pain, constipation or during / after child birth.

Most women don’t know that help is available and it can be an embarrassing topic so I hope that these pages are helpful in answering some of the questions you may have about your body and whether Women’s Health Physiotherapy can help you. Physiotherapy rehabilitation of Pelvic Floor

The pelvic floor is a complex structure made up of a group of muscles that support the pelvic organs and form the the birth canal and passages for urine and stool.

The pelvic floor muscles are often described as a hammock lifting and supporting the pelvic organs above. These muscles need to be able to contract to keep us continent, but also they must relax to allow for urination, bowel movements, child birth and sexual intercourse.

Pelvic Floor Dysfunction

Problems with the pelvic floor can occur when these muscles get weak (hypotonic) or too tight (hypertonic). It is also possible for these muscles to combine a pattern of too much tension in some areas while too relaxed in others!

When the pelvic floor muscles are low- tone (hypotonic) the hammock becomes less effective at supporting the pelvic organs and symptoms such as urinary or bowel incontinence, urgency and pelvic organ prolapse can occur. These are NOT a normal part of aging and the muscles can become weak for many reasons.

The good news is that a structured exercise program to strengthen the pelvic floor muscles is effective in reversing the symptoms in 80% of women.

Following an assessment treatments for the symptoms of hypotonic pelvic floor muscles include:

• Pelvic floor re-training and exercises
• Provision of pelvic floor educators/muscle stimulators to improve your activation and power of your pelvic floor contraction
• Pilates based pelvic stability exercises to strengthen the abdominal muscles which play a supporting role in the strength of the pelvic floor
• Assessment and treatment of any low back/pelvic pain issues which can lead to weakness of the pelvic floor muscles

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