Having a weak pelvic floor can negatively impact your health in many ways. We go over how rehabilitating and strengthening your pelvic floor can restore your quality of life here.
Pelvic floor rehabilitation is a way to strengthen your pelvic floor, and it’s especially beneficial if you struggle with pelvic floor dysfunction.
Pelvic floor rehabilitation – or pelvic floor therapy – involves a series of physical exercises of both strengthening and relaxing your pelvic floor muscles. This helps to improve your stability, sexual function, and control over your bladder and bowels.
The goal of pelvic floor rehabilitation is to increase your ability to control your pelvic floor muscles, improve your awareness of contracting and relaxing your pelvic floor muscles, and decrease any pain you’re experiencing with pelvic floor dysfunction.
Pelvic floor rehabilitation is typically the first line of treatment recommended to treat pelvic floor dysfunction and all the symptoms that come with it. That’s why at Prairie Garden Medical located in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joel S. Tupper, MD, and Daniel Jones, MD, and the rest of our team want you to know more about the pelvic floor and just how pelvic floor rehabilitation can restore your quality of life.
Explaining the pelvic floor
Your pelvic floor muscles are located within your pelvis between your tailbone and pubic bone. They support your internal organs such as your colon and your bladder, not to mention your uterus and vagina if you’re a female.
When you have a weak pelvic floor, it can lead to the following symptoms:
- Pelvic muscle spasms
- Difficulty urinating or passing bowel movements
- Chronic constipation
- Frequent urinary tract infections
- Constantly needing to use the bathroom
- Lower back pain
- Not having a strong pelvic floor can also cause women to lose sensation in their vagina or men to experience erectile dysfunction.
While there are things that you can do on your own to prevent losing strength in your pelvic floor, there could be outside things affecting your ability to strengthen it, such as:
- Pelvic surgery
- Obesity
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Nerve damage
- Genetics can also be at play since some people are born with naturally weaker pelvic muscles and connective tissues.
How pelvic floor rehabilitation works
Since having a weak pelvic floor can so adversely affect your quality of life, going through pelvic floor rehabilitation is a great step to take in order to restore it.
Some things you can do on your own to strengthen your pelvic floor include doing Kegel exercises – simply contracting and releasing your pelvic muscles for set time increments – not straining when using the bathroom, doing yoga, and taking warm baths.
If these aren’t effective, the next step is physical therapy. Your physical therapist assesses your symptoms and your core strength before helping you come up with a treatment plan that works best for you. Your physical therapy regime may include manual therapy, biofeedback, electrical stimulation, or trigger point therapy.
If you’re ready to start strengthening your pelvic floor, don’t hesitate to contact our team in order to get started. You can schedule an appointment with us over the phone or online today.