Hi, and welcome to pelvic exercises. As you can see, I'm ready to work out today,
we're going to teach you, if you're someone living with a prolapse, or pelvic floor issues.
How to do some safe strength exercises that we're going to cover four strength exercises? Today,
we're going to do I'm going to teach you how to do a safe squat that protects your pelvic floor,
we're going to do a back strength exercise called a low dumbbell row. And then we're going
to go into a couple of upper body arm strength exercises that will also help you exercise and
support your pelvic floor. So let's start with a safe squat. Get your weights if you'd like to
use some weights, and if you're not using weights, just your hands and your thighs,
your shoulders roll back and down, you think yourself nice and tall. Important,
or key point to protect your pelvic floor as you do your squats is to keep your knees narrow. I
try to think about keeping my knees about and feet about a fist width apart. So when you come down to
the squat, shoulders back and down, thinking yourself nice and tall. Lower yourself down
slowly and not coming too deep. The deeper you go into your squat, the more pressure in your pelvic
floor. So you can do some nice little shallow squats and you can exercise with me if you like.
Let's do eight repetitions. So starting nice and tall. Roll your shoulders back and down, knees
facing forward. And again, neither about a fist with the part. Let's start here. Take it down,
slowly down, and then lift back up. Now remember, it's vital that when you do a good squat, that you
can see your toes just in front of your knees. If your toes are back underneath your knees,
you're likely to get sore knees from doing squats. And again, deep squats can cause that
knee pain as well. So try and keep your squats nice and shallow. What I'm up to I think about
number three, coming down slow and steady thinking about my posture throughout. And
also to maintain the curving my back through our so just a nice small squat. Let's do three more
down for to push through your heels and lift up nice and tall. and come down slowly again,
down slowly lifted up expel fill your thigh muscles working hard there and take
it down slowly keeping your knees facing forward, lifting back up and have a rest.
Now if your strength training then you like might like to do two or three more sets of
that today to get through three more sets of eight to 12 repetitions. But let's move
on. For our purposes. We're going to go into a back strength exercise now. Now to do that
This exercise is called a low dumbbell row. So you can use a ball or a bench for this
exercise. Take your knees just slightly apart. Incline your body keeping an inward curve in
your back. If you have an inward curve in your back, then your spine will be protected. Use
your other hand. The hand that's not lifting the weight to support your body. And again,
keeping a soft elbow they're not hard and rigid. So this my soft elbow, I'm in a really nice
position my chins tucked in ready to strengthen my middle back muscles. This is the low row action,
it scooping the weight along the line of your thigh, bringing the weight up to about your hip
height and lowering it down slowly. I'm exercising the muscles in the middle of my back these muscles
here that helped to support my posture. So lifting up slowly, you can exercise along
with me if you like. If you are exercising with me remember keeping your chin tucked, lifting up,
squeeze your shoulder blade towards the spine and lowering it back down. Lifting slowly when
you're strengthening the lowering down phases, a strengthening phase as well. So it's important
that you lift and lower, slow and steady controlling the weight throughout and lifting
the weight throughout a full range of movement. I think read about six repetitions there. Let's
try for a couple more slow and steady scooping it up and down and one more time, up and down.
Now if you're exercising at home, you might like to repeat that exercise on the other side and
repeat it for a couple of sets two to three sets of eight to 12 repetitions. Let's move along now,
the third exercise we're going to do is called a bicep curl. Many of you will
have seen a bicep curl exercise before just get my little white here. So bicep curl exercise,
start again with your knees close together, bring your arms down by your side and lift
your chest so that your posture is nice and tall. Shoulders are back and down,
you're comfortably set. The closer your knees are together with this type of exercise,
the more you'll have to use your core muscles that is the muscles between your shoulders in
your hips. Also to your nose that were lifting a weight on a surface so that when we're sitting our
perineum or area between our vagina and anus that pelvic floor area is supported, so it's much less
likely to come under strain. So since yourself nice and tall, chest is out, shoulders back and
down and let's breathe out as we lift. So breathe out. Lift up the weight, and slowly back down,
control the ball. Try not to let it move slow and steady. Keep your chest lifted. So you're thinking
yourself nice and tall on the ball. Lifting up and lowering down slowly, just moving his arms through
their full range of movement. And down again, attend to your posture. Make sure that your chest
stays lifted. I'll keep going that said inside on so you can see me inside sitting. So then you're
lifting nice and tall, chin is tucked, spines nice and long, crappy hits towards the ceiling.
Let's do a couple more repetitions low the weights fully. Lift them up. Again, my knees are staying
close together. Everything supported, lifting up slowly and relaxing down. And now rolling
your shoulders give me neck and shoulders a break. Nice big circles around and down. How'd
you go with us at home. Okay, let's now move on. We're going to do some back strength exercises,
upper back and back of shoulder exercises. So nice combination exercise. This is essentially
called a rotator cuff exercise. And it's very much in the back of your shoulders,
but we're going to incorporate some back into it as well. So again, sit your posture,
bring your knees close together, lift your chest, rolling your shoulders back and down.
Bring your elbows to right angles. And once again, I've got two kilo weights,
you could be using one kilo weight, you could be using a couple of tins out of the cupboard
to strengthen or you might like to use no weights at all to start with. Let's go bring your elbows,
bring the arms back, keep your elbows locked into your side and take the weights back through.
Now remember in with all weight training, you should never feel any pain with an exercise.
So it should feel comfortable. If you feel discomfort. Don't move your arms quite so far
into the range if there's any discomfort in your shoulder region to do the exercise properly. When
you bring the weights back now your shoulders should move down you should be fit seeing my
shoulders move down as I take the weights back because I'm moving my using my back muscles as
well as the back of my shoulders. Let's do three more repetitions there slow and steady. That's
too and once again, my perineum supported nice safe exercise for pelvic floor one more time,
and back down and roll out your shoulders. How you traveling and home getting some
strong muscles through our upper body through our shoulders and through our upper arms.
We're going to finish our session today with the triceps exercise. So this is the muscles for the
back of your arms. Many women are concerned about these muscles and like to make those
muscles toned. So I'll teach you how to do a basic tricep extension today. And once again,
I'll teach you this sitting on a single sign on to you so you can see what I'm doing. Okay,
so using a single white, what I want you to do is take the way take your elbow up beside your
body and incline your body forward, you need to use your other hand to support your back so that
you're not leaning forward and risking straining your back. So keep one hand on your thighs. Keep
an inward curve in your back and keep your chin tucked down again to this no pressure on your
neck. Now the action of this exercise is to extend the arm back, keeping your elbow nice and high and
low the weight back down. Can you see how you I'm keeping my upper arm tucked into my body,
keeping my elbow nice and high and my neck is in line with my my the rest of my spine there.
I'm just my chin is just slightly forward for this no pressure on my neck and I'm lowering
the weight lifting the weight out right up to the full length and lowering it down slowly
and we do a couple more repetitions they're out and slowly back and one more time extending the
weight out and back. I can feel it. I've worked the back of my arm muscles there just now.
So what have we done today? We've done some exercises that are safe for your pelvic floor,
especially someone who's living with a prolapse issue if you've had a past hysterectomy,
or if you're have some urine incontinence issues, you'll be wanting to support your pelvic floor as
your exercise. So we've talked about doing safe squats principles, keeping your knees narrow,
and addressing your posture and not squatting too deeply. We've talked about doing some low
dumbbell row exercises for your posture, again, a nice leaning forward exercise to strengthen your
middle back muscles. And then we did some lovely seated exercises to support our perineum. Again,
not using heavy weights. We don't need to be using heavy weights and we don't want
to use heavy weights. If we're living without a pelvic floor issue medium weights are fine.
And then again lifting and lowering for our biceps. We did a rotator cuff exercises the
back of our shoulders and our middle back and then we finished off with the triceps exercise.