Home » Blog » Best Pelvic Floor Exercises

Best Pelvic Floor Exercises

by | Last updated: Feb 6, 2024 | Blog, Men's Health, Women's Health | 0 comments

It’s super important that your pelvic floor is strong and flexible.

Your pelvic floor includes the muscles attached to the hip bones that hold up your bladder and in the case of women, your uterus.  

Your pelvic floor can be damaged surgically and through trauma, especially vaginal childbirth. It can also start to lose collagen and strength with age and loss of sex steroids. Pelvic floor dysfunction can affect both males and females. So these exercises can help both men and women. 

The Number One Exercise for the Pelvic Floor is Called Kegels. 

Kegels are the most basic and the most direct pelvic floor exercise. Simply put, you engage your kegels muscles, which are the muscles that are surrounding the bladder, the urethra and supporting the uterus, by contracting those same muscles that you would use to stop your urine flow. 

A great way to find your kegels muscles is to go to the bathroom, start to urinate, and try to stop your flow of urine. The effort you’re using to stop your flow of urine are your kegels muscles. 

Once you find the kegels muscles, then hold that contraction for a couple of seconds. And then slowly relax. It’s important you don’t stay contracted consistently. I like to use what I call an elevator motion where the contraction rises. 

Imagine that you’re contracting the muscles a little bit higher up, one level at a time, contracting three or four levels, and then slowly release. Don’t push, just relax. Repeat the slow controlled contractions at least 20 repetitions per day. 

You can do kegels exercises anywhere. No one will even notice that you’re doing them. After the birth of my second child who was quite large for me and caused quite a bit of damage, I definitely had a weak pelvic floor. So once I was healed enough to start doing kegels exercises, which was about a month postpartum, I practiced kegels’ exercises on the way to work. I would love to listen to the radio but I would not turn it on until I had done 20 kegels. Within a couple of months of daily kegels exercise, my pelvic floor was strengthened.

If you have a weak pelvic floor, you need to fit kegels into your daily routine. It does not have to be associated with any other exercises. If I was able to drive and do kegels, believe me you can do it too. You just need to focus on doing the exercises. 

Number Two: Vaginal Weights

These weights look like eggs of various sizes and heaviness. When your muscles are very weak, you can’t hold a lot of weight. For instance, if you have weak arm muscles, you cannot carry or pick up very heavy things. Same with the vaginal muscles. So you start with placing the largest, lightest weighted egg into your vagina and hold it there for at least 20 minutes. 

As your pelvic floor muscles get stronger you will be able to hold the weight while doing activity, like walking or light housework. Then you progress by inserting a smaller but heavier weight. Using vaginal weights is a great way to test your pelvic floor strength. Vaginal weights can be found online. 

Number Three: Intercourse

Yes, sex really does tone the pelvic floor for women. And sex can help strengthen the pelvic floor in men too.

My female patients who have a healthy active sex life have a much more toned vagina than ones who do not have intercourse. 

Number Four: Using a Vibrator

There’s some really good studies that have shown when women who have stress incontinence, which is a sign of weak pelvic muscles, use a vibrator regularly, their pelvic floor strengthens enough to prevent urinating every time they cough or sneeze. 

If you have any questions, please join me in our Hormone Support Group. You get access to it through my free Hormone Reboot Training. I’ll see you in my next video.

Hormone Reboot Training

**This site sometimes contains product affiliate links. We may receive a commission if you make a purchase after clicking on one of these links. Rest assured, we only recommend products we’ve used and love.**

About the Author - Deborah Maragopoulos FNP

Known as the Hormone Queen®️, I’ve made it my mission to help everyone – no matter their age – balance their hormones, and live the energy and joy their DNA and true destiny desires. See more about me my story here…

     

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *