As we find ourselves spending more time at home, we want to provide you with the best tools to help enhance your self-care routine! One often overlooked area of the body is the pelvic floor. Your pelvic floor is a hammock of muscles that helps support the bladder, vagina, and rectum and helps you control your urine and bowel movements. Over time, these muscles become weakened as a result of childbirth or aging. Just like any muscle in your body, we have to regularly exercise our pelvic floor muscles in order to maintain their strength.
But when thinking about pelvic floor exercises, you don’t always have to set aside a dedicated time for performing Kegel’s, as there are many easy ways we can incorporate the pelvic floor into exercises that we may already be doing.
One simple and really effective exercise is the “glute bridge”. In order to perform this, lay on your back with both feet on the floor and your knees. Gently raise your pelvis towards the sky and while lifting, contract both your gluteal muscles and perform a Kegel, or a tightening of your pelvic floor muscles. Hold this at the top for at least 5 seconds and then relax your hips back down to the floor. This exercise is really great for providing stability within the hips, you are not only exercising the gluteal muscles which support your hips and back, but you are also strengthening your pelvic floor.
Another effective exercise is known as the “superman”. For this exercise, lie flat on your stomach with your arms and legs outstretched. Then slowly raise your arms, shoulders, and legs off of the ground while contracting your back muscles, gluteal muscles, and again your pelvic floor. Hold this for five seconds and then release. This muscles again is working on building that core strength, while also incorporating the pelvic floor muscles.
The pelvic floor and your core and interrelated in that they both provide key support for your body throughout the back and hips. Incorporating pelvic floor muscles strengthening into everyday exercises can be a great way to sneak in that strengthening for added stability within the body.
Do you regularly exercise your pelvic floor? Comment below!
Take care down there!
With love,
Dr. Shweta Desai
