What is your Pelvic Floor?

Your pelvic floor is the group of muscles and ligaments in your pelvic region. The pelvic floor acts like a sling to support the organs in your pelvis – including the bladder, rectum and uterus or prostate.

Contracting and relaxing these muscles allows you to control your bowel movements, urination and for women particularly, sexual intercourse.

The importance of Pelvic floor health

What issues can you face with a dysfunctional pelvic floor?

Pelvic floor dysfunction is the inability to control the muscles of your pelvic floor. This term refers to a range of issues such as:

• urinary issues, such as the urge to urinate or painful urination
• constipation or bowel strains
• lower back pain
• hip pain
• pain in the pelvic region, genitals, or rectum
• discomfort during sexual intercourse for women
• adductor pain

The importance of pelvic floor health in a sporting population

Athletes are at greater risk of stress urinary incontinence due to their continued exposure to increases in intra-abdominal pressure throughout training.

What does this mean? Well, most sports involve one of two exercise forms; jumping and landing (eg. running, athletics) or the Valsalva maneuver (eg. weight lifting).

These two activities exert different deformations upon the pelvic floor due to their distinct direction and type of pressure loads.

Hip & Adductor injuries in a sporting population

Did you know that your pelvic floor muscles are directly attached you your hip muscles?

That’s right, the hip bone is connected to the pelvic bone and the pelvic floor muscles are connected to the one of your hip muscles: the obturator internus (OI)! It is reported that 64-72% of patients with hip dysfunction also experience pelvic floor dysfunction. This is largely due to weak lateral rotators and tight adductors.

How can we help you?

Personal Training
A personal trainer can help you to strengthen your lateral rotator muscles to help prevent hip dysfunction.

Sports Massage
A deep tissue massage of the adductor muscles can help to relieve muscle pain and tension, as well as overloading the pelvic floor.

The PelviPower Chair
This non-invasive method involves sitting on a chair as the pelvic floor muscles contract up to 25,000 times by the magnetic waves in the seat. One to two training sessions per week are adequate to effectively strengthen the pelvic floor.

Pelvic Floor Trainers & Toners

My Pelviva

Pelvic Floor muscle trainer with reactive pulse technology

Pelviva is an award winning, life changing, Pelvic Floor muscle re-trainer that uses a specially developed stimulation programme to treat the symptoms of bladder leakage in women.

Receive 10% off purchase price when you use the code EmmaJames at checkout when you purchase online.

Visit the Pelviva Website for more details and how to buy.

Secret Whispers

Secret Whispers ™ is a pelvic floor toner for women. Its 6 Step Pelvic Floor Exercise Strengthen & Tighten Your Pelvic Floor Fast. It helps with – pregnancy, childbirth, incontinence and bladder control.

Secret Whispers ™ pelvic floor packs are available to purchase from our main Emma James Physio clinic or online:

Click here to Purchase Secret Whispers Products

Bye for now 😉
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Blog Post by India
Sports Therapist at Emma James Physio