Hi and welcome to pelvic exercises, I'm Michelle Kenway. Today, I'm going to teach you how to train
your pelvic floor muscles doing some Kegel exercises or pelvic floor exercises. Now,
I'm assuming that you already can feel your pelvic floor muscles. If you can't
feel and find your pelvic floor muscles working, please send me your email address,
and I'll send you a pelvic exercises.com.au. and I'll send you a free 10-minute instructional
DVD to teach you how to find and feel your pelvic floor muscles. Otherwise,
if you're confident that you know that you're able to activate your pelvic floor muscles correctly,
let's go through the essential steps at performing that exercise in setting.
So, first thing we need to address is our posture. Remember that your posture is very important to
do your pelvic floor exercises correctly. I'll turn side on so that you can see what I'm going
to be doing here. Start, with your knees fairly close together, particularly if your pelvic floor
muscles are weak, much easier to find your pelvic floor muscles and feel them when you need to close
together. Second step is to sit nice and tall. Lift your chest as if the chest is on your sternum
is being drawn up by a string. Importantly, you have an inward curve in your back that you're not
sitting slumped, which would make it much harder to activate these muscles. So, sitting nice and
tall, lengthen through your spine, crown of your head is lifted up towards your ceiling. Okay,
so that's our posture. Now, we've done our position we've done our posture, let's talk about
our technique. Remember, our technique is to lift and squeeze the muscles inside, I'm going to use
my hands to demonstrate the action to the pelvic floor muscles because you won't actually see the
muscles lifting inside. You can't see your buttock explicit that it shouldn't squeeze, muscles inside
your thighs shouldn't tighten, the action takes place inside your pelvis in that type of manner.
It's a squeezing and lifting sensation in through your back passage and in through your vagina. It's
a tightening sensation in and around the in and around the urethra or where your urine comes out.
So, let's try and get that action lifting away from the chair surface inside but not squeezing
our buttocks. Are you ready? So address your posture, nice and tall, shoulders back and
down. Let's start to lift and squeeze through your back passage draw up for your vagina,
keep lifting and breathing, tighten around the urethra, keep lifting, keep lifting and breathing,
keep lifting and breathing, lift and breathe, and slowly relax and let the muscles go. How did
you go? Did you manage to feel a lift and squeeze through that area? Alright, if you've done that,
okay, let's try that again. Put into your nice tall posture. Let's start through the
back passage, working into the vagina and then squeezing it in around the urethra. Ready,
and go. Lift and squeeze, one, and two, keep lifting, keep breathing, three, and four,
and five, keep going 6, 7, 8, keep lifting 9, 10, and slowly relax your pelvic floor
muscles. I want you to try when you relax your pelvic floor muscles to really relax
them right back to their resting position their initial fully relaxed position and give them some
recovery time. Between each contraction, good contraction that you do, you need to
give your muscles time to recover their small muscles and they take some time to recover up
to 15 between 15 and 30 seconds so that you can make each attempt that you do your best attempt.
So, giving those muscles a bit more time to relax and recover, make sure they're back to their
relaxed resting position and let's try again. Sit yourself nice and tall, shoulders back and down,
and let's start to activate through your back passage, lift and squeeze through the anal area,
lift and squeeze through your vagina, keep lifting and tensing through your rethrow
whether urine shape. Keep lifting, keep lifting and breathing, lift and breathe, lift and breathe,
lift and breathe, lift and breathe. Now slowly, slowly, control the lowering down of those muscles
and fully relax and give yourself time to recover. So, you might have found that you couldn't hold
from hold those muscles on contract them for the time that I was counting, perhaps you're able to
hold them on for one to two seconds. That was fine. That's where you start at. We're trying to
get anywhere up to 10 seconds long in our nice strong contractions as we lift up and lowering
downside 10 seconds as we lift and slowly lowering down and giving them a good recovery time.
When you're practicing at home, you can repeat those exercises every day and perform them during
the day. Ideally, you should be performing your exercises three times a day and you
start where you're capable of starting off. For example, if you can do a three-second hold,
that's what you do, and if you can do that three times setting up, that's what you do, and you try
and repeat that three times throughout the day. If you can hold those pelvic floor muscles for 8,
9, 10 seconds. Again, that's what you do. For as many times as you can do that, repeating
them throughout the course of the day. So, let's review the key elements of doing Kegels and help
or pelvic floor exercises correctly. First thing is position, thinking yourself nice and tall,
and posture, chest has lifted shoulders back and down, knees close together. And then the action
being a lift and squeeze are drawing up sensation in through the back passage vagina and urethra
lifting up and the other key element was to fully relax those muscles back down to the fully relaxed
resting position and give them some recovery time. Well, that's all from me today. Lots of
practice. I look forward to exercising with you soon and here's to your healthy pelvic floor.