Exercise and Pelvic Floor Symptoms: Tips on where to start!

If exercise is something that you’re currently doing but having pelvic floor symptoms with OR if you aren’t currently exercising due to your current symptoms, here are a few tips on where to start improving and managing your symptoms.

Firstly, check in with yourself and take note of exactly what you’re feeling in your body during the exercise or activity. Acknowledge what you’re feeling and make a mental note of when you’re feeling these things. For example, is it during a heavy lift that you feel pressure or heaviness in your perineal/saddle region? Is it during a jumping jack that you leak a little bit of urine? Is it during a lunge that your SI joint (sacro-iliac joint) hurts? Symptoms that we look for, as mentioned here, would be the 4 P’s: peeing or pooping (uncontrolled leakage), pressure (prolapse type symptoms), peeking (doming of your abdomen, diastasis recti) and pain. If one of these symptoms is occurring, it doesn’t mean you cannot do this exercise or activity, it means we need to adjust it to better suit your body and your comfort.

Secondly, adjusting the exercise or activity. Take the exercise or activity that’s causing you the symptom and try doing it differently. There are many things you can change about an exercise, and these aren’t in any particular order, just start somewhere! That might be the only thing you need to change. But if it doesn’t help, move on to another category and try that. There may be only one thing you need to change or there may be several things. Take it one step at a time and see what works. Here are a few things to try:

• Reps and Sets: How many are you doing? Can you lower that number and stop before you start getting the symptom? If you normally do 10 squats and by the 8th one you start feeling the symptom, stop at 7. Rest your body then repeat for the two or three sets that you normally would do.
• Positioning: I challenge you to get out of the way of thinking that there’s only one way of doing an exercise. Many times, people hear that they had to do an exercise a certain way and that it’s bad or that they’ll get injured doing it any other way. This is not accurate information. Try to change something about how you’ve positioned yourself for the exercise. For example, with that same squat, try turning your toes out to the side a bit, does that feel better? Try with a wider/narrower stance, try holding your free weights differently (up on your shoulders or down at your sides).
• Resistance: Exactly how it sounds, alter the amount of resistance you’re using. Try changing the weight, using a band instead of free weights or using free weights instead of a band.
• Tension: Has someone told you to “brace your core”? Is this cue actually helping your squat feel better? When you turn on your abdominal muscles there’s a sliding scale of tension from just barely drawing in the belly button to the maximum squeezing and even holding your breath. Play with the tension because not every task requires the same amount of tension.

Did any of this help? Great! But if not, there are many, many more variables that you could try changing so don’t get discouraged. Book in with a pelvic health practitioner and we can provide an individualized assessment and rehab plan that is specific to your goals!