How To Strengthen Your Pelvic Floor For Pregnancy

Have you been told to perform Kegel exercises to strengthen your pelvic floor for pregnancy?

Did you know that unnecessarily strengthening your pelvic floor can actually result in what we call a Hypertonic Pelvic Floor? This means the muscle is tight and has a difficult time lengthening/relaxing. During labor you need to be able to relax your pelvic floor so your uterus can do its job and push your baby out. Yes, it’s your uterus pushing, not your pelvic floor!

Most women think they need to use their pelvic floor to help push, when in actual fact this is the last thing you want to be doing!

So you have fallen pregnant and you want to prepare your pelvic floor for pregnancy and birth whilst keeping it safe during exercise to prevent the risks of urinary incontinence and or pelvic organ prolapse in the future.

So what should you do?

Here are my 4 top tips to preparing your pelvic floor for pregnancy, birth and beyond:

1. Understand the anatomy of the pelvic floor.

​The pelvic floor is part of the core unit along with your diaphragm and the deepest layer of abdominals (the transverse abdominis). Which means it does not work alone! And it responds really well when this team of muscles work together. This team helps to keep you stable, supported and helps with pressure regulation inside your abdomen.

Understanding how the pelvic floor works within the core unit is crucial. Once you understand HOW it is supposed to work then you can train your pelvic floor and core muscles the correct way depending on what YOU need. Everyone is different. That means if you have pre-existing pelvic floor weakness you can begin to strengthen it in the correct way. Or if you have pelvic floor tightness and need to learn more about the relaxation side of pelvic floor function then you can practice this correctly using the team of muscles.

2. Master 360 Breathing to optimize pelvic floor function.

How you breath is so underrated when addressing your pelvic floor and core function. Because your diaphragm (breathing muscle) is part of that central core team, how the diaphragm moves impacts how the pelvic floor moves. If your diaphragm doesn’t move well (because you chest breath alot) then your pelvic floor doesn’t naturally respond very well and increases your risk of pelvic floor dysfunction like leaking, weakness or even tightness. During your pregnancy learning how to breathe using your diaphragm with 360 degree movement of your rib cage will help your pelvic floor maintain its optimal function. And better yet learning how to do this now will come in handy when you are post birth wanting to return to exercise and needing to retrain your core unit.

3. Understand how to contract and relax your pelvic floor.

Relaxation is KEY to labor and birth. Like I said earlier relaxing your pelvic floor is so important for birth. If you need to strengthen your pelvic floor (or any muscle for that matter) you also need to be able to relax (we often refer to this as lengthening the muscle) properly in order to get a good contraction of the muscle. Pregnancy is a great time to learn this correctly. If you need help knowing if you do this well a women’s health physiotherapist can perform an internal examination and give you real time feedback on both the contraction and relaxation of your pelvic floor and guide you accordingly.

4. Understand what it means to bear down onto your pelvic floor and ensure you are not doing this during your daily movement or exercise.

If you do your pelvic floor contractions (or Kegels) wrong (which most women do), you could in fact be bearing down. This is when you are pushing pressure down onto your pelvic floor, rather than contracting the muscle up correctly. Constant bearing down onto your pelvic floor can increase your risk of pelvic organ prolapse. This is very common in pregnancy and you want to reduce your risk of this as much as possible. Avoiding any activity or exercise that might be too hard for you or where you have a tendency to bear down onto your pelvic floor is important in order to keep your pelvic floor safe. If you understand what it means to do this then you will be able to bring awareness to when you may be doing this, or be able to modify exercise or activities where you do this.

If you are pregnant or plan on falling pregnant and are wondering what to do to keep your pelvic floor safe and prepare your core for birth and beyond make sure you start with my 4 tips above. You will be so much more prepared then if you just do Kegel exercises and you will thank yourself later.

If you need further help knowing how to do all of these I help guide women on optimising pelvic floor function and exercise safety during pregnancy all the time and would love to help. Find out more about my 1:1 consultations and programs through the link below.