Read on for comprehensive and practical guidance on ways you can effectively relax your pelvic floor muscles. When your pelvic floor muscles are able to contract and relax properly, your pelvic health and overall well-being may improve.

Your Pelvic Floor Muscles and Their Importance

What you need to know about the pelvic floor: The pelvic floor muscles are integral to many everyday bodily functions, including breathing, elimination, pregnancy, birth, sexual activity, and more. Your pelvic floor muscles provide a base of support for the internal organs, and their function influences how well your core is able to respond.

As you can see from the image above, your pelvic floor muscles are connected to the bones of the pelvis; they also connect to the muscle systems above and below the pelvis.

Ideally, your pelvic floor muscles react reflexively to the activities you engage in by relaxing and tightening in response to the loads placed on them. In other words, you shouldn’t have to think about engaging or relaxing your pelvic floor muscles all day long. However, many people have pelvic floor muscles that are hypertonic or “too tight,” even when they’re not performing any activity at all. It’s like having the volume on your TV just a little bit too loud all the time–maybe it’s tolerable for a while, but eventually, it becomes irritating and affects your quality of life.

Common issues related to tight pelvic floor muscles often include:

• Leaking urine, especially under higher load, such as sneezing, jumping, or running (stress incontinence).
• Painful intercourse
• Constipation
• Low back pain

Hypertonic pelvic floor muscles can also make engaging the rest of the core muscles more difficult, leading to unnecessary strain on other muscles, compensation patterns that cause pain, and more.

Learning to consciously relax your pelvic floor muscles can help your body practice new patterns and can help your pelvic floor muscles learn to engage and relax reflexively. You may find it difficult at first to let go of excess pelvic floor tension–but patience and practice will help.

The pelvic floor muscles work together to support the internal organs and to facilitate multiple bodily processes. Rather than give you an exhaustive list of every single muscle and how it works, let’s explore a few major functions of the pelvic floor and see whether you can feel those muscles working.

Breathing: Your pelvic floor moves every single time you breathe, in conjunction with the diaphragm. As you inhale, the diaphragm widens and moves down, and the pelvic floor descends and lengthens. As you exhale, the diaphragm and pelvic floor move back up. Imagine a balloon with one hand on top and the other on the bottom. If you press down from the top, you can feel a gentle pressure on the bottom. This coordinated movement of the diaphragm and pelvic floor helps manage intra-abdominal pressure–the pressure within the abdominal cavity. You can feel all of this at work if you take a deep breath in and hold it. Now try gently pushing downward with your pelvic floor as if you’re pushing out a bowel movement. That’s the feeling of the balloon moving down. Now, exhale fully and notice how your pelvic floor engages slightly to move upward; you can enhance this feeling by imagining that you’re picking up a blueberry with your inner labia. Again, this is an exaggeration of the amount of engagement you’d have during normal breaths without exertion.

Here’s a great video on connecting with your pelvic floor and releasing pelvic floor tension.

Because we take so many breaths per day, learning how to breathe for optimal pelvic floor function is incredibly important. That’s why Restore Your Core® helps you learn to coordinate your breath with movement so that breathing well becomes second nature.

Elimination: Your pelvic floor muscles are also involved in elimination. Stress incontinence (sneeze pee/peeing while jumping, running, etc.), urge incontinence (that gotta pee right *now* feeling), fecal incontinence, and constipation can all result from excessive pelvic floor tension. Of course, you’ll need to check with your doctor to make sure there aren’t other issues. But for now, you can feel your pelvic floor muscles at work when you stop the flow of urine, then relax to finish eliminating. In Restore Your Core® I don’t actually recommend practicing engaging your pelvic floor by pausing the flow of urine–this just reinforces the habit of excessive tension in the pelvic floor. Rather, in RYC®, I teach you how to relax your pelvic floor without having to force it.

Your pelvic floor muscles also need to relax and tighten reflexively in order to enjoy sexual intercourse. Many people with vaginas find that tight pelvic floor muscles make penetration difficult. Learning to relax your pelvic floor might just improve your sex life! A pelvic floor therapist who does internal work may be an important part of your care team if you find that pelvic floor tension is getting in the way of your pleasure. If you’re not ready to look for a PT or OT just yet, you can work with guided imagery, as in this “know your pelvic floor” exercise (scroll down for the audio exercise).

Finally, during childbirth, the pelvic floor muscles need to be able to yield to allow a baby to pass through the pelvis on its way out of the birth canal. This yielding creates more space between the bones of the pelvis and makes space for the baby. Excessive pelvic floor tension during birth may contribute to:

• tearing and difficulty healing
• postpartum incontinence
• pelvic organ prolapse, and more.

Some of the common causes of excessive pelvic floor muscle tension can include

• stress,
• trauma,
• lifestyle choices,
• and movement patterns and habits.

Because the pelvic floor muscles also connect to some of the large muscle groups in the body (e.g., the gluteal muscles and the abdominal muscles), how you stand and move throughout the day can affect the resting amount of tension in the pelvic floor. Sitting in the same position all day can place your pelvis into positions that cause you to hold excess tension in the pelvic floor. For example, if you find yourself sitting on your tailbone instead of your sit bones ischial tuberosities), you might find that places your pelvic floor muscles in a shortened position, which means they’re under a little bit of tension all the time. Learning how to balance your muscles and how to move in many ways throughout your day can help reduce this tension. If you want a complete system for being able to relax your pelvic floor muscles consistently, we have a 12 week program dedicated to core / pelvic floor recovery. Read more at Lauren Ohayon’s Blog.