Weightlifting and the Pelvic Floor
/Weightlifting and the Pelvic Floor
Weightlifting can be intimidating on its own; now add in pregnancy, post partum, sleepless nights, back pain, and God forbid peeing your pants every time you lift something heavy!! NO THANK YOU. Count me out on going to the gym! Having some sort of pelvic floor dysfunction can feel lonely, mostly because nobody talks about it. I am here to not only talk about it, but let you know it’s more common than you think. In June and in coming up in late August, Langford hosted a workshop with me, Morgan Kerschen PT, DPT about how to lift with considering the pelvic floor. In this blog will break down and discuss what the pelvic floor is and what should be happening with weight training.
The pelvic floor is a group of muscles located at the bottom of the pelvis that provides support to the internal organs, pelvis and hips. The pelvic floor has 3 main roles in the most basic description: sexual, sphincteric, and supportive. Both the sphincter and supportive functions play a huge role in the ability to weight lift without pain or urinary incontinence and even properly gain muscle around our hips, buttocks and core. The pelvic floor muscles have a close relationship with our deep core muscles. The deep core are our built in back brace! They help to avoid that ‘wow, my back is sore from lifting legs yesterday’ feeling, which nobody likes. The pelvic floor and core also helps our body perform proper breathing mechanics, which if you have ever weight lifted heavy or at a high intensity, breathing mechanics can be the difference between achieving a lift and not!
When we breathe, the pelvic floor needs to be able to move up and down with our diaphragm. With an inhale the pelvic floor will move down and expand. With an exhale the pelvic floor will lift and contract. This is very important for movement needed for weight lifting and jumping. Let’s break down why this matters with weight lifting. If we cannot achieve a proper breath, we may not be able to recruit the muscles needed to lift the weight in front of us. Mechanically, if the pelvic floor is too tight, or we are gripping (sucking in our belly), holding our breath or squeezing the pelvic floor or core muscles, then there is no expansion with the inhale. This is almost the same as not having the range of motion in our buttocks and legs to lower down into the squat. Not only would you not be able to stretch the muscles needed to get low into the squat, but you also would not be able to contract them to stand up, because they would already be tight!!
Lets next break down why pelvic floor movement is needed for jumping. If you jump up in the air then come back down and land, what happens at the ankles, hips and knees? Not sure? Stand up, try it. They all bend! The joints in your body are absorbing all the impact from landing. So now let’s think about pelvic floor. Maybe you pee a little every time you jump. When does it happen? I bet when you land. If the pelvic floor is really tight, rigid, immobile it won’t move with a jump. As you jump up into the air, the whole body, including the bladder goes up and when your body comes down, so does the bladder, running right into that really tight and rigid pelvic floor causing an impact or ‘stress’ to the bladder. This ‘stress’ from the bladder running into pelvic floor when landing leads to a little bit of leakage called Stress Urinary Incontinence (SUI). So what should we do to reduce this? Allow the pelvic floor to move with the whole body as you jump! The pelvic floor lifts as you take off and jump (exhale) and expands (inhale) as you land and the joints absorb the impact. Then the bladder never runs into anything!!! Having a mobile pelvic floor is step one to achieve proper weight lifting and jumping mechanics. Part two has to do with coordination and strength. Achieving pelvic floor mobility gets you more than halfway there! Once pelvic floor can move properly and well, it becomes easy to recruit and strengthen the muscles, just like anywhere else in the body.
In this workshop we practiced these exact movements with the concept of pelvic floor mobility and related it to four basic weightlifting moves: overhead press, squatting, dead lifting, and lunging. Practiced how to breathe when performing each of these moves and what it should feel like to have pelvic floor relax to expand during the inhale as the body lowers down into the squat, the lunge etc. and contract the core, lift the pelvic floor with the exhale as the body is lifted up with the weight. By learning how to use the core, pelvic floor and breathe together, the body can function more efficiently and achieve the movement you desire to do.
Dr. Morgan Kerschen, PT, DPT, graduated from the University of New Mexico in 2021. She is one of Langford’s two physical therapists who treat patients with pelvic health concerns. Morgan works with women pre- and post-partum, and sees a wide variety of individuals with orthopedic pain, pelvic pain, trouble with incontinence and more.
Morgan enjoys working with individuals of all abilities and backgrounds. She is also a certified cycling instructor who teaches group cycling classes. She loves to bake, and decorates sugar cookies for all sorts of occasions. In her free time, Morgan loves to be active by playing soccer, kickboxing and running as well as being outdoors with both her dog and husband.
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