Your pelvic floor might be contributing to your persistent hip and back issues
Raise your hand if you experience hip and/or low back pain.
Raise your hand if that pain you experience is there more often than not and is constantly nagggggging…
NOW, raise your hand if you have ever considered that it could be related to your pelvic floor.
My guess is that the majority of you would raise your hand to the first two questions without hesitation, but then the third question comes out and now you’re thinking “NOPE, not me...not now, not ever my pelvic floor is fine.” This is where the research comes in.
In a study performed in 2017, it was found that 95.3% of women with lumbopelvic pain(hip and/or back pain) had a pelvic floor dysfunction. That is an LARGE percentage of humans. If this is the case, how come the pelvic floor is not one of the suspects to assess when a client complains of pain in this region?
Pelvic floor therapy became an idea back in the 1950s, when Arnold Henry Kegel invented the kegel exercise, as a treatment for relaxation in women. The idea has been around for an extremely long period of time, yet the pelvic floor is still not assessed on consistent basis with patients that experience lumbopelvic pain. Since the development of the kegel, pelvic floor therapy has expanded to be much more complex than “hey, you have some leakage when you jump? Greatest do 3x10 kegels every day.” It is much much different, let’s take a look at why.
The pelvic floor is vital - it holds in your pelvic organs, it controls your bowel and bladder, it allows us to breathe fully, and it is responsible for all sexual function. Without it, life as we know it would not exist.
With such important and constant roles, if we overwhelm the pelvic floor with other tasks that it is not meant to do, we can develop pelvic floor dysfunction. Just like anywhere else in the body, we then must retrain those muscles to function in the way that they should allow for effective, efficient movement.
Looking below at the images of the pelvic floor, lower back, and the hip you can see how closely intertwined the pelvic floor muscles are with those areas.
Because of this, when some of those muscles are not functioning properly, our brain will find the next best route that will allow us to compensate to meet the demands of the task.
Oftentimes, this forces us to utilize different muscles to breathe, to stabilize our pelvis, to use the restroom, to walk, to exercise, to lift heavy loads, to play with our kid...etc etc, the list goes on.
With all of that said, the first thing that needs to be assessed is if we can create optimal motion within what we call the abdominal canister when we breathe. Looking below you can see the muscles of the abdominal cavity, which make up this canister. With every breath we take, the abdominal canister must function together to allow air to come in and to come out of our lungs. As we breathe in, the diaphragm and the pelvic floor muscles must simultaneously lower as the abdominal muscle relax. This allows air to take up space in our lungs. As we exhale, the pelvic floor muscles and diaphragm must elevate while the abdominal muscles contract, to push the air out of our lungs to prepare for our next breath. Because of this, we should be able to feel our pelvic floor relax and contract with normal breathing. If we can’t then that is where pelvic floor treatment begins.
Think about it like this - if our abdominal canister isn’t functioning efficiently to allow us to breathe optimally then our bodies will find ANOTHER way to breathe AND to hold our pelvic organs AND to allow for sexual function AND to stabilize throughout the pelvis AND to allow load transfer to happen from the legs to the arms & vice versa. This means that muscles that are not responsible for tasks must now take on that role, IN ADDITION to what they are already working to do. That means that with every move we are overworking somewhere and underworking elsewhere to simply continue to breathe. If that’s the case, how will we ever reach our full potential, to do all of those things that we love to do, and to live our lives pain-free?
We work with people every day that have not seen success in the treatment of their lumbopelvic pain because there was a pelvic floor-related issue that hindered them from a full recovery.
If you feel like you are struggling with your breathing, with a pain that just won’t go away, or a specific lumbopelvic dysfunction then enter your email below and our team will reach out to you to see how we can help.
ANNNNND stay tuned for our next blog post dropping on common symptoms you might experience with pelvic floor dysfunction.
If you’re experiencing persistent back or hip pain and want to know more about our approach then click here to schedule a free discovery call.
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