STOP Making These Kegel Mistakes. Do THIS instead!
Have you been doing kegels to try and strengthen your pelvic floor during pregnancy or your postpartum recovery to address leaking challenges, pelvic pain or discomfort with intimacy? And despite your best efforts you feel like you’re not making progress or maybe even making your symptoms worse? If so, know you’re not alone. I find this to be true for so many of my patients when they first come to see me. A big reason for this lack of progress is because training your pelvic floor to simply squeeze on command is not how your pelvic floor works in real life!
In this video I unpack the 4 most common mistakes people make when doing kegels, explain why these mistakes interrupt your progress towards strengthening your pelvic floor and at the end, I teach you the right way to effectively strengthen AND coordinate your pelvic floor so you can do so with confidence.
The 4 Most Common Kegel Mistakes
Mistake #1: Not knowing the intention behind doing kegels
The goal of kegels should not to be to “hulk out” your pelvic floor, or get it toned, or to make it extra tight down there. Extra tension in these muscles actually adds to pelvic floor symptoms and disfunction. A healthy pelvic floor is like a trampoline. It needs to maintain a certain amount of tension to provide support while also being flexible to coordinate with the muscles of your core team and neighboring hip muscles for bowel/bladder control, sexual function, and movement. (To learn more about the pelvic floor and its functions watch this video.)
The goal of kegel training is to teach your brain how to sequence your pelvic floor with your core team in your day-to-day activities. At first this will be a conscious coordination effort as you are learning, but with practice it will become automatic and you won’t have to think about it. Focusing on the coordination piece of your kegels is where the magic happens! It’s about how you’re doing them, not about “how many” or “how hard.”
Mistake #2: Using the wrong muscles
I see this a lot when my patients are first learning and trying so hard to generate a really forceful squeeze. Examples of this include clenching your jaw, lifting your shoulders, squeezing your butt and inner thighs, etc… while doing your kegels. If you notice this happening when you’re practicing, this is your body compensating for your pelvic floor. In other words, your brain is choosing other muscles to do the work instead of your pelvic floor. This is feedback that your body needs coordination training.
Mistake #3: Just squeezing
Squeezing is only half of a kegel! Remember a strong pelvic floor is NOT a tight pelvic floor. It needs to be able to both contract and lengthen to work correctly. Your pelvic floor is designed to respond to your movement as part of the body’s shock absorbing system. When you’re walking, running, jumping, etc. your pelvic floor is contracting and lengthening continuously in coordination with your hip and core muscles. When the pelvic floor can’t contract and lengthen effectively, that forces other areas of the body to have to compensate, which increases the likelihood of low back pain, hip pain, leaking, and other pelvic floor symptoms.
Mistake #4: Holding your breath!
The pelvic floor and the diaphragm, which is your primary breathing muscle located in the base of your ribcage, work together like a piston inside of your torso. When you breathe in, your diaphragm lowers and your pelvic floor lengthens in response. When you breathe out your diaphragm lifts and your pelvic floor contracts in response. This piston system is what sequences the pelvic floor and deep core team to coordinate together. But when you hold your breath, this piston system is interrupted, and can result in extra downward pressure on the pelvic floor. Breathing needs to be the foundation of your kegel training.
Watch the full video with a kegel tutorial here.
