Forget Kegels: Pelvic Floor Exercises That Actually Work

The group that has heard most about pelvic floor exercises is women who have, or are about to have, kids. And what they know about pelvic floor exercises is that doing concentric contractions (squeezing) will tighten up their pelvic floor muscles. 

Everything about that is wrong.

Because everyone has them. When your pelvic floor muscles stop working properly you'll know all about it because you'll suffer problems like incontinence and chronic lower back pain. Doesn't sound that great to me. What if your pelvic floor muscles worked better?

Well, then you'd see increased core strength, more power and better spinal stability. So whether your bumper sticker says "powered by fairy dust" or "Do You Even Lift Bro?" (Or, indeed, "I train like a girl: try to keep up") your pelvic floor is important.

What Is It, Where Is It And What Does It Do?

Your pelvic floor is the base of your core. It's the thing that stops the contents of your abdomen from falling through the middle of your pelvis onto the floor. It surrounds your genitals and anus and plays a role in maintaining their function. In anatomical terms the pelvic floor is made up of the pubococcygeus, the puborectalis, the iliococcygeus, and the coccyges. 

Oh, sorry, did you not order a mouthful of Latin? It's not that hard to make sense of these, in fact. Anywhere you see "ilio" that means it connects to the pelvis. Anywhere you see "pub-" that means it connects to the pubic bone, the bone just above your genitals. Anywhere you see "coccy-" that means it connects to the tailbone. Knowing that, it's easier to make sense of the names. There's a muscle that ties the coccyx to the os pubis, a muscle that ties the pelvis to the coccyx, a muscle that ties the rectal area to the pubic bone and a muscle that ties the inside of the hips to the sacrum. Surrounding all this is a lot of connective tissue, but the job of the pelvic floor is to hold the bottom of your torso together. Think of it like the mirror image of your diaphragm, and remember that it also plays an active role in breathing!

Having made sense of what the pelvic floor actually is, and clarified its job — it has a lot more to do than strengthen your vaginal wall — we can talk about what we want from a pelvic floor exercise. Ideally, we want something that will both lengthen the muscles of the pelvic floor and increase their neurological activation.

Why Kegels Won't Cut It

Kegels are concentric contractions. When you concentrically contract your pelvic floor one of two things happen. One is that you actually contract other muscles because you can't neurologically "find" your pelvic floor. That's the most common, so for people who haven't had good coaching Kegels just don't work at all a lot of the time. The other is that you teach the muscles to gradually be tighter and tighter. 

READ Kegel Exercises For Men

And there's a big problem with that. The pelvic floor is a postural muscle. It needs to be strengthened but not shortened. Making their resting length shorter doesn't make them more effective. What it does is tie your insides together tighter and tighter. That's a bad outcome. What we want is long, relaxed and powerful, with an appropriate, elastic resting length, not short, tight and tense.

Pelvic Floor Exercises That Really Work

Here are a few pelvic floor exercises that produce better results that Kegels.

1: Squats

Some people think squats are the answer to everything. But glute-focussed squats lengthen the pelvic floor, relax the muscles directly above it and give it something to pull against. When your flutes are too weak, your pelvic floor has nothing to pull against. Every time it contracts it pulls your tailbone in tighter and tighter and does more and more damage to your low back posture. In fact, some of the pain attributed to weak pelvic floor muscles comes from over-tight pelvic floors brought on by concentric contractions. Squat instead.

How to do it: Use a glute squat. Your feet should be wider than your hips, with your feet somewhere between straight forward and about 45° out to the side. As you squat, consciously drive your knees out as far as you can, and don't let your shins stray from vertical.The result will be a squat that really loads your glutes rather than your quads, which is what we want here. Your glutes are pulling on your pelvic floor, gradually dragging everything back into alignment, and your pelvic floor is dining what it's supposed to do: balancing out that pull. 

2: Glute Bridges

Glute bridges work best as an auxiliary to the squat. You're looking to build strength and maybe some size in the flutes, and bridges are the most effective way to produce voluntary maximal contraction of the glutes.

3: Yoga — Specifically, Warrior Pose

Yoga helps the pelvic floor because of its emphasis on breathing. The Warrior pose is particularly helpful because it encourages proper pelvic and low back alignment. Most people will find their first attempt is harder than they thought because doing warrior pose properly requires you to control femoral rotation under the pressure of a deep wide stance, something most of us suck at. Get good at it and you'll condition your flutes and pelvic floor together, and give your pelvic floors workout powering your breathing.

How to do it: Stand with your feet apart, with your front thigh between 45° and parallel to the ground and your back leg straight, like a lunge. Your back foot should be flat on the floor, facing 45° out from the direction of your front foot which should be straight forward. Your knees should follow the direction of your ties, which means you'll probably have to concentrate on pushing them out into external femoral rotation. Just like with the glute squat, this is conditioning the outside of your pelvic musculature, giving your pelvic floor something to pull against. Make sure that your pelvis is "neutral" — not tipped forward or back, and not lop-sided. This is hard,and provides even more of a workout for the low back and pelvic muscles. Don't worry. Work into it gradually and it will come. Once you have the pose in place, take slow, deep breaths into the middle of your abdomen, pilling your belly button towards your spine on the in breaths. As you exhale, brace your abdominal wall slightly and push from the bottom of your abdomen. 

Finally...

4: Qigong

Qigong is the discipline of cultivating "qi" or internal energy. You don't have to believe in, or care about, "qi" to use qigong exercises, though. This one comes from the Crane system of Kung Fu. 

Stand with your feet together, with your big toes touching. Don't let your ankle bones or knees touch. Again, this is about controlled femoral external rotation. Have your hands in front of you at about chin height. As you inhale slowly and deeply into your abdomen, press your arms up, palms out, in front and up. If you keep your neck in neutral, you should be able to just see your hands '"through your eyebrows." At the same time, bend your knees, keeping your heels on the floor. As you exhale, lower your arms, stand back up into the starting position — and pull your anus in toward the centre of your body. 

READ Ten Surprising Health Benefits of Yoga for Men

Huh? Why would you ever want to do that? Because of the collective names of the main pelvic floor muscles: levator ani. I'll let you guess what that means, but doing that movement under the load of intraabdominal pressure teaches your pelvic floor to contract the way it's designed to, and being in a stretched position teaches it to lengthen out too.

If you like what you've read, or you think I've missed something important, please get hold of me in the comments section below.