Pelvic floor exercises for women involve three essential steps,
and today, I'm going to guide you through these three essential steps that you need
to know to do your exercises correctly at home and get your best possible training results,
particularly if you're a beginner just starting out.
Hi, I'm Michelle, and today, we're going through the three essential steps for doing
pelvic floor exercises correctly. Now, as I've already mentioned, these exercises,
these three steps are essential for doing your exercises correctly so that you've
got the right technique from the outset and this, is what will give you the best
strengthening and training results ultimately. So we're going to go through these three steps
and what I'll be going through those steps with you together so that by the end of the video,
you know exactly how to do them, and then we'll go through the three best positions. So stay with
me for those the three best training positions for actually progressing your strength training,
as you're exercising from beginner through to more intermediate and advanced. So,
let's get started straight away, we'll be doing the exercises both either lying down if you prefer
to do them lying down or also to sitting up in a chair and I'll be doing the exercises sitting in a
chair with you. So if you'd like to actually get into a chair now, that would be great.
So, to do these exercises correctly, these pelvic floor exercises, you need to be able to first of
all, locate your pelvic floor muscles. So, where you are sitting now, I want you to sit away from
the back of the chair and just roll between your sitting bones side to side can you feel those
bones. Now your pelvic floor muscles actually sit between those bones on the inside and if you look
at the pelvis, this is the pelvis so it's those bones underneath there, you can see them there,
the muscles actually hammock underneath there. Okay, so they're like that, that's what they
call the pelvic floor muscles because they sit at the base of the pelvic floor, they also run from
the pubic bone at the front to your tailbone. So you can feel that bone that's behind your vagina,
and the tailbone, they also run from front to back there. So they're filling up that
space underneath there. So if you actually then sit and rock from side to side or in a circle,
you can actually feel that you're sitting on those muscles. If you have a closer look at them like
this, and I'll bring this close to you, you can actually see that the pelvic floor muscles here,
wrap-around, they're actually wrapping around the anus at the back so you can see there, and you
can also see how they wrap around the vagina, and also to the urethra here the urine tube,
which is just in front of the vagina. So you can see in the red, they're all pelvic floor muscles,
and they sit in layers underneath and you can see this that pelvis like that. So that
is what we're strengthening. Because they're on the inside, you can see that nothing should
happen on the outside. So you shouldn't see your buttock squeezing your pelvis moving,
nothing else should happen when you're doing these exercises correctly,
which is what makes them a little bit tricky. So, this is why we go through these three steps.
The first step is to walk sit away from the back of the chair, set yourself up for success that
you've got nice tall posture. Think about the muscles around the anus. So the muscles
that are that just shows you encircling around the anus. Now we're going to do two actions.
It's a squeeze as if you're stopping gas from passing and also an inwards lift. So,
can you do that but without tightening your buttocks? So the buttocks don't squeeze the
buttock muscles don't tighten, but just really isolate in and around the anus so
that it squeezes close, can you feel that, and then draws inwards lifts up in towards the body,
and then see if we can lower it down. So that's step one, these muscles are called the anatomical
name is Levator Ani, which means lift the anus. That's what these muscles are due in part.
The second step is to do the same thing, squeeze and lift, but this time around the
vagina. So this can be a little bit harder to feel, particularly if you're a beginner.
So, what you can do is you can use a towel roll to sit on and you can see this picture up above here,
you can use it as a saddle. So you can basically roll it up, sit on it like a saddle,
and that gives you a reference point to sit on to lift away from when you're doing your exercises.
So we're squeezing around the vagina, we're lifting inwards, and then we're lowering down, and
relaxing. If you visualize pulling out a tampon, and you're resisting that pulling, that's the
action so it's not just a squeeze, it's a squeeze and a lift inwards. And then most importantly,
it's a relaxed and let go. So let's try that. Here we go. So nice and tall. Normal breathing.
Go squeeze through the vagina. So Squeeze, lift inwards,
relaxed down, and let go. How did you go with that? Was that a little bit harder
than perhaps doing the anus or did you find that both came on together? If they both
parts came on together, then that's fine too. That's something that you'd expect to happen.
Now the third and final step is squeezing and tightening around the urethra. So this
is where the urine comes out. So you can imagine that you're stopping the flow of urine as it's
already started. So you can imagine stopping it and you could do that as a test occasionally if
you wanted to test it out as well. But this is the third step. So squeezing and tightening around the
urethra, the urine tube, which is just in front of the vagina. So squeeze, and tighten if you can,
and relax, sit down, and rest. So how did you go through those steps did you find that different
parts came on together, or they all came on at once? What we want is for all those parts to
come together, because that is your complete pelvic floor exercise. So, let's go through
that and that's out of our grand finale here to activate our pelvic floor exercises correctly
and do our correct pelvic floor exercise. So steps one, two, and three altogether, sit nice and tall
where you are, squeeze and lift through squeezing first up, and then lifting up inside the anus,
vagina, and urethra all at once. Now, see if you can keep your buttocks relaxed, your
upper tummy relaxed, and your breathing normal, keep squeezing, keep lifting, relax, and let go,
and that's the exercise. Now more might have already relaxed and let go, and that's fine. Women
find that they can do different amounts according to how strong their pelvic floor muscles are. So
you might find you can do a one-second hold at first or a 3, 4, 5 even longer second hold
but most importantly, that you actually getting the technique right rather than your endurance.
Now at the start, I talked about some positions, your starting position,
your best Starting position is lying down. Now, this is because gravity or the muscles don't have
to lift against gravity. If you're lying down, I showed you the pelvis before and the muscles
sitting under here. If they're like that, you can imagine they're not having to work as hard
as when they're in the upright position, which is what they normally are. But this is why lying
down on your back or on your side or even on your tummy. If you feel that better, is a really great
way to start. If you're a beginner, then you can progress to sitting or if you find that you
can do your sting exercises first up, and even using the towel roll that I showed you, you can
use that towel roll to progress to and then move the towel roll and do your exercises in setting
then when you can advance to standing because standing position is the math position the
muscles really need to work out in they're holding up the contents of your pelvis,
your abdomen, and they have to work much harder in that position. So that's where
you'll get really good strength training results from your pelvic floor exercises.
So, if you'd like a full workout, it's coming up next, a full pelvic floor training workout
for when you're familiar with these exercises. Otherwise, I'd really like to thank you very
much for watching today. I really hope that you found the exercises the information beneficial
if you have as always if you need give it a thumbs up below because that encourages other
women to watch the video too. I'll look forward to seeing you in the next video. Bye for now.