Pelvic Floor Exercises to Improve Overall Health and Fitness

If carried out regularly pelvic floor exercises can help to boost your overall health and fitness. There are a number of essential muscles deep in the body that perform important functions. Even if you exercise regularly these muscles can be neglected.

If the muscles in the pelvic floor become weak this can lead to problems such as incontinence and poor sexual function. Pelvic floor exercises will target this area and help you to strengthen and tone your muscles to bring them back to a good level of fitness.

Benefits of pelvic floor exercises

Pelvic floor exercises can offer a number of benefits for the body:

- The muscles in the pelvic area support many important organs in the body. They also assist with everyday functions such as digestion. Keeping these muscles strong and toned can improve the overall function and health of your body.

- Pelvic floor exercises can help to increase the circulation of blood around pelvic region. This can improve healing and help to prevent conditions such as prolapse, piles and constipation.

- Pelvic floor exercises are an important way to prepare your body for labour if you are pregnant. The additional weight of an unborn baby can put a lot of stress on the pelvic region. This can leave the muscles stretched and weakened. Pelvic floor exercises will tone up this area and help to support the extra weight and stress of pregnancy and childbirth.

- Strong pelvic muscles have also been linked to improve sexual function. It has been show that pelvic floor exercises can help boost the intensity of orgasms and improve erections. This can lead to a more satisfying sex life for both men and women.

Pelvic Floor Exercises

Pelvic floor exercises involve just a gentle squeeze and release technique. No one will be able to see what you are doing so you could carry out your pelvic floor exercises when you are on the bus, sitting at your desk or watching the TV.

Here is an easy way to can get started with pelvic floor exercises:

- Firstly you need to identify your pelvic floor muscles. The easiest way to do this is to sit down and relax your body. All you need to do is squeeze the muscles that you use to stop the floor or urine or prevent yourself from passing wind. These are the pelvic floor muscles.

- Make sure you don’t clench your main stomach muscles or buttocks whilst you are trying to find your pelvic floor muscles.

- When you are confident you have identified the right muscles you can then get started. All you need to do for simple pelvic floor exercises is to squeeze and hold the muscles for 5 to 10 seconds. Rest for a moment and then repeat. If you can do this ten times twice every day then you will soon be able to tone up your pelvic floor muscles.

- When you get better at these pelvic floor exercises you can start increasing the time you squeeze and hold your muscles. When your pelvic muscles are toned you should be able to squeeze and hold them for around a minute.