Hi, welcome to pelvic exercises.
I'm Michelle and today I'm teaching you how to relax your pelvic floor muscles.
Now, many women have trouble relaxing their pelvic floor muscles and this can cause pelvic
pain and a range of pelvic floor problems.
There's a couple of strategies I'm going to be teaching you in this video on how to relax
your pelvic floor.
First of all, I'm going to be teaching you how to breathe, breathe into your diaphragm
to relax your pelvic floor muscles.
Next, I'm going to be teaching you abdominal bulging, which is the second strategy we teach
women and men and how to relax their pelvic floor muscles.
And then finally, how to relax the pelvic floor muscles themselves.
So first of all, let's think about your breathing.
When you breathe and breathe in your upper ribcage, you tend to use your tummy muscles,
your upper shoulder muscles, and it's difficult to relax the pelvic floor.
To relax the pelvic floor muscles.
You need to learn a technique called diaphragmatic breathing.
Now diaphragmatic breathing means breathing into your belly.
So it's a breath if you place your hand over your lower abdomen, and take a deep breath
in and feel your belly rise forward.
That's a diaphragmatic breath.
And we know that when we die from medically breathe, it helps to relax the abdominal wall,
the lower abdominal wall, which also works with the pelvic floor muscles.
So at home, I'd like you to place your hand over your lower abdomen.
Have a deep breath in, fill up the ribcage.
And can you feel your belly rise forward and out and lower it down.
Try again breathing in deeply.
Fill up your belly and relaxed out.
Now see if you can do the same thing with your hands outside your ribcage.
As well as rising your belly forward, I want you to take your ribcage wide.
So the breath is breathing in, ribcage expands out wide and relaxing down slowly.
So let's see if we can do the two of those together.
Breathing in make your ribcage wide, as well as taking your abdomen out forward.
So try to do the two with me.
slow deep breath in ribcage wide belly forward and release down.
So that strategy is to start to try and relax the lower abdominal wall.
The second strategy is to in relaxing the lower abdominal wall is to place your hands
over your lower abdomen sitting nice and tall using the diaphragmatic breathing that I was
just teaching you breathing in and let your belly move forward and relax down and exhale.
See if you can relax that lower abdominal wall into your hand.
So really releasing out as if you're making yourself into a barrel shape.
So lower abdomen coming forward and waist going wide.
Breathing in, breathe out and at the abdomen move forward and waist go wide.
You might even sense a relaxation, your pelvic floor when you do that one more time breathing
in.
So deep diaphragmatic breath in.
Let your belly lower out in front and waist go wide and release the breath.
Now finally, thinking about the area between your sit bones and the front and your tail
bone that's where your pelvic floor muscles lie.
So thinking between the sit bones, see if you can relax that area down.
Gently bulge down through your pelvic openings.
If you're in sitting at the moment, see if you can actually let those openings relax
down just slightly.
As you bowled your abdomen for gently, you don't want to bear down.
You don't want to put any pressure on the pelvic floor but see if you can actually barge
your abdomen forward and release down through your pelvic openings and open out.
Try again.
Deep breath in fill up and now bulge abdomen forward and that your pelvic floor relaxed
down.
Visualize that letting go and releasing down and relax.
Now ideally, you're performing this lying down lying down is a great position to start
to practice this.
You can be lying down with your legs up over a pillow lying down on the bed comfortably
relaxed, doing some relaxed breathing to start with letting your belly relax and then allowing
your pelvic floor to relax with that particular exercise.
So let's just review what we've talked about today.
We've talked about diaphragmatic breathing.
We've talked about breathing into the abdomen.
And we've talked about releasing through the pelvic floor muscles as essential components
of relaxing pelvic floor muscles.
So, if you'd like some more information on how to relax your pelvic, our pelvic floor
muscles, please visit me at pelvicexercises.com.au and there's a link to an article below on
how to relax your pelvic floor muscles as well.
So I look forward to exercising with you again soon.
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Bye for now.