Getting in on the Ground Floor

Looking down into the pelvic bowl
The bottom of the photo is the pubic bone

Everyone's talking about pelvic floor strength. Without it they say you are doomed to a life time of leaking, varts and falling out parts. Vaginal weight lifting is being promoted online as a way to improve your sex life and the health of your pelvic floor. And then there are the "VaGenie Martini" events selling a Kegel exercise tracking App by urging women to "exercise their inner strength". They have a fun and creative ad showing a beautiful woman supposedly cracking a walnut with her vagina. Before we go Kegeling our brains out in order to be able to shoot ping pong balls across the room we need to ask ourselves some questions. What does strength mean when it comes to the female pelvic floor? Does tightness necessarily equate to the kind of strength we need to carry a baby for 9 months, then open for birth, and finally close again during the postpartum period? Is there a right amount of tightness or tone? Does anyone know what that right amount is? Is tightness the only factor to having a healthy pelvic floor?

The mysteries of the pelvic floor are deep. Just like the pelvic space itself they are many faceted, three dimensional, movable, static, strong, changeable, and interconnected. The true strength of the pelvic floor is more like a complicated dance with many partners rather than a one directional tension. 

Looking up from below
The top of the photo is the sacrum and tailbone

I'll be posting a series of pieces about true pelvic strength. Here is a little food for thought to get you started. Researchers are delving into how our pelvic floor tension plays a role in the need for cesareans. In Aran's 2012 study they took a group of first time mothers they were about to induce and used a device to measure their Kegel strengths. They then induced all of them and waited to see what happened to their labors. Some women birthed vaginally and some birthed via cesarean section. They then looked back at their pelvic tone numbers to see if their was a correlation. The "women requiring a cesarean finish to labor had higher pelvic tone". When writing about this study Gail Tully, of Spinning Babies, says she would "refer to this as "spasm" in the pelvic floor or shortened muscle fibers, probably shortened (tightened) through over Kegeling or clenching." But is over Kegeling the only reason for pelvic floors too tight to birth easily or is this also one dimensional thinking?  

More to come...