How to find and feel your pelvic floor muscles
How to find and feel your pelvic floor muscles working? If your pelvic floor muscles are weak (or if you’ve never exercised them before) it can be really hard to know whether you’re actually contracting those muscles at all, or whether you’re doing the exercises correctly. It’s really important that you know how to find the muscles and feel them before you start exercising them.
Your pelvic floor muscles actually sling, like a hammock, between the front bone and the tail-bone, and they’re a supportive hammock in through that area, holding your insides in and helping you with your continence.
What is the feeling of squeeze the pelvic floor muscles
A proper pelvic floor contraction feels like a lift and a squeeze inside that area. It feels like tightening and squeezing in through the anus (or your back passage.) It feels like a tightening, squeezing sensation in and around your urethra (or the urine tube) where your urine passes through. So that action happens inside, in that sort of an action.
Let’s try and do that and find that feeling by actually touching our perineum. To get yourself comfortable to perform this technique if you lie on your side. Now if you feel that area what I want you to do is try and lift and squeeze through your back passage. Try and tighten around the urethra, as you’re feeling that area. What you should feel is that the area of skin above your finger (or that your finger’s resting against) just lifts inwards slightly. Can you feel that as you draw up and in?
Can you feel that area just lift inwards just a fraction? Can you keep lifting it? Can you keep going and keep breathing? Keep lifting inside and keep breathing, and slowly lower it right down and fully relax.
Could you feel those muscles contracting? If you can feel an area lifting, that’s your pelvic floor muscles. If you can feel a bulging, you’re probably not doing the right action.
Holding your pelvic floor muscles
Keep holding it. Can you feel the area around the penis just tightening a fraction? And relax down. Did you feel a gentle inward movement of your lower abdomen? That tells us that you’re actually contracting those lower deep core muscles, as well as some of your pelvic floor muscles.
You can also imagine trying to stop the flow of urine, so if you’re drawing up and squeezing through your urethra, try and hold that there. Keep holding it. Keep holding. Keep holding and relax down, and rest.
It’s a matter of practicing regularly and finding out which technique works best for you. You’ll find that after practicing using these techniques you should no longer need to use them as often or frequently when you’re practicing, and you’ll start to feel the pelvic floor muscles working without using those techniques at all. Practice makes perfect.