Exercise balls. Deep breathing. Clench, relax, repeat. Sound familiar? Pelvic floor exercises come in many different forms, but most promise to improve your health by strengthening the muscles that surround your bladder, rectum and sex organs.
Kegel pelvic floor exercises
When you think about pelvic floor exercises, you might think of Kegel exercises. Although they’ve been around since 1948, they saw a boom in the late-20th century due in part to everyone from Cosmopolitan to Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones singing their praises. Unsurprisingly, most of these claims are about as real as a someone on a sex columnist’s salary renting their own pre-war apartment in Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
First off, we’re not bashing Kegels. When performed correctly, there is evidence to suggest that these pelvic floor exercises can help treat conditions like incontinence. However, one of the key criticisms of Kegels is that they can often be performed incorrectly and can end up doing more harm than good1. Another issue is that because Kegels have become synonymous with pelvic floor exercise, they are often the go-to for treating all kinds of conditions. It’s no surprise that it’s not as simple as this. Regardless of your condition, you should always speak with a healthcare professional first to get the best treatment plan.
Searching ‘performing Kegels correctly’ on the internet gives you countless – and often conflicting – results. Most instructions mention ‘squeezing the pelvic floor muscles’ – but what if you don’t know which muscles these are or how to engage them? Without supervision from a professional, it’s easy to see how you can make mistakes.
Speaking of mistakes, here’s some common ones when performing pelvic floor exercises:
· Activating the wrong muscles: It sounds obvious, but you might mistake the buttocks or inner thighs for your pelvic floor and engage those instead. Great for your #Gains, not so great for your pelvic health.
· Forgetting to relax: Tensing and squeezing the pelvic floor without relaxing it can make it tighter which can induce discomfort during penetration. The pelvic floor should experience an ebb and flow of engaging and relaxing, just like any other muscle.
· Pushing when you should tense: This can be do more damage to your pelvic floor due to unnecessary strain and make the entire experience much more uncomfortable.
· Lack of consistent training: This is more complicated as it’s often linked to a lack of motivation from not seeing results, but lack of results usually comes from not doing the exercises correctly. It’s a cycle that can be hard to break without guidance.
Kegels focus on squeezing, tightening and clenching the pelvic floor muscles to make them stronger, but therein lies the issue. Tightening alone does not make your pelvic floor ‘healthy’. It needs to go further than that.
Reimagining pelvic floor exercises with Empelvic
We believe that a healthy pelvic floor moves freely, contracting, relaxing, and stabilising as needed through breathing, changes in pressure, and muscle movements throughout the body – whereas a nonfunctioning pelvic floor is rigid. Training the muscles requires engaging with them in the right way.
Our pelvic floor cushion, Empelvic, and its accompanying method has been designed to make training straightforward and promote consistency with a simple, easy-to-use solution. Empelvic’s unique
design helps with pelvic floor training by providing heightened feedback of the area, allowing you to engage and relax the muscles with more clarity.
We know life gets in the way a lot of the time, which is why Empelvic has been designed to be discreet, portable and non-invasive, so you can train in as little as five minutes a day wherever you can find a flat surface.
We know that starting any kind of training can be intimidating, so we’ve created useful guides to show just how simple Empelvic is to use. You can find our video guides here and information on how it can help treat specific conditions here.
Whichever route you take, remember – you’ve got this.
