Why You Might Want To Add Pelvic Floor Exercises To Your Fitness Routine

The undertaking of any fitness routine should start with figuring out your personal goals. What do you want the outcome to be? What are you hoping to achieve? It’s different and unique for each individual, including and especially women who are pregnant and those who have recently, and not-so-recently, had babies. 

If having a shorter, easier pushing stage of labor, or, at the very least, having some control over a “failure to progress” diagnosis during the pushing stage is important to you, then adding pelvic floor exercises to a fitness routine should be a very high priority. Those who take my childbirth education classes understand precisely how their physiology can work to help or to hinder the labor process. During pushing, a toned pelvic floor will have two functions: one is to essentially cradle the internal organs, including the vaginal canal, facilitating the baby’s journey, and the second is to release and allow the expulsive uterine contractions, along with the woman’s pushing efforts, to birth the baby. Weak pelvic floor muscles can be futile in their role, and they can even inhibit or sabotage the normal progression of birth.

Just as a woman’s abdominal muscles are burdened during pregnancy, her pelvic floor muscles are also taxed. The weight of the baby, the uterus, the fluid and the placenta, all combine to add pressure. The pelvic floor muscles are beautifully designed to support the bladder, the rectum and the typically small uterus, but now they are being called upon to do quadruple duty! Then, there’s the actual event of a vaginal birth, at which time these muscles are further stretched and called to task. Engaging in pelvic floor work in a postpartum fitness routine is comparable to doing after-baby ab exercises. The aim is to return the tone of those muscles to a pre-pregnancy condition. The stakes, however, are even higher with the pelvic floor. Loose abdominal muscles may keep you from buttoning your favorite jeans, but loose pelvic floor muscles are likely to cause some level of urinary and even fecal incontinence (in more severe situations).