The Pelvic Floor: A Holistic Approach to Strength and Mobility

Your pelvic floor, as the name suggests, should be a floor, but not a door. For about 70 to 100 years. You need your pelvic floor to be able to support you both through descending forces that come down through your body and gravity into the pelvic floor, but also as you move around, ascending forces as you step and walk around. But I have rarely, almost never seen people train their pelvic floor properly. And. And I'm not just talking about women, I'm talking about men, too. So I want you to stay tuned while I talk about the holistic view and how to treat and train your pelvic floor. Greetings. I'm Akimbisso. I'm the owner of Soul Core Fitness, and I've been in this health and fitness field for 30 years. So I started as a personal trainer 30 years ago, but I am now a summer therapist and a summer trainer. So I combine that with my previous knowledge of strength and conditioning to run a business. So back in the day, I never thought about the pelvic floor, to be honest, before I became a therapist and more of an osteopathic trainer, it never crossed my mind as to do anything for the pelvic floor. I didn't think anything about it, good or bad. The only thing I heard about the pelvic floor was Kegels for women. And so that was it. Kegels are a part of it, but they need to be done correctly, which we'll talk about later. But there's a lot of other places in your body that have direct and indirect connections that affect the pelvic floor. It's a holistic view and that's what I want to talk about on this channel. It's holistic, not just give you a couple exercises that you can do and feel good about yourself. Give you information that actually makes a sustainable difference. So if you want to hear more about this type of view and information, then subscribe to the channel and subscribe and hit that bell. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and then share with your friends. All this will tell the YouTube algorithm gods that, hey, this is a good channel. This is a good video so I can communicate to more people and help more people. I'll put a video about once a week and that's it. See you then. Having a dysfunctional pelvis and pelvic floor can cause a lot of issues, especially for you women. You guys have very little space in your pelvis and so if anything's off or not working properly, it could very quickly lead to some sort of visceral problems. Now, this can happen for men, too, but we've got more space, so we have more room for error. That doesn't make it right to be dysfunctional, but we have more room for error. Now, it's not just visceral problems that can be affected by a bad pelvic floor. Your strength and mobility and conditioning can be very much affected by a bad floor. Your pelvic floor, your pelvis connects the upper body and lower body. So if the pelvis is off, if the floor is off, it's going to have the lower body come into a bad floor or ceiling and have the upper body sit on a bad floor. The example I was given is this. Imagine you're in your apartment and you look over and you see that your refrigerator door is slightly ajar. You're like, well, that's not good. And so you go through and try and fix it manually. And you hire somebody and you do all these different techniques to make sure the door stays shut, but it doesn't really totally close. And you're like, you're at your wit's end, but all of a sudden, you look down, you notice that the floor is slanted. Well, the door is open because the floor was not balanced and it had the door keep opening. So the more appropriate way to address the door being open is to fix the floor. It's the exact same thing in your body, right? You don't want to just think that you can work in a certain area and not have the pelvis affected. So what do you do? Right? Do you just do Kegels all day long? Well, no. But before that, I want to talk about all the different parts of the pelvic floor so you can get a bigger view on what to look for. So the pelvic floor is not just your levator knee and your coccygeus. You can, in fact, break down the levator knee into three muscles. Your puborectal pubococcygeus and iliococcygeus. Those three, which makes you up the levator knee along with the occocygeus, and then your piriformis and obturior internus, which make up the posterior and lateral walls, all form the pelvic floor. Those are the pure muscles, right? Levator knee. And those three muscles, coccygeus, piriformis and obturate internus. But you want to think about the muscles that also work with those. So just outside the sacrum on the backside is your Deep glute max, because the piriformis attaches to the front part of the sacrum. Let's go this way. Front part of the sacrum, the glute max attaches to the back part. So if I want to have a good balancement here, I need to work the glute max as well. And then you have your iliopsoas muscle. So iliopsoas muscle, part of it is the attachment on the inside the hip, the ilio part, that muscle runs always from your hip into your pelvis, like literally through the pelvis and onto your spine. Now, those are a lot of muscles. There's not all of them, but there's a good amount of muscles. But you also think about the fascia, which includes the ligaments of the body. So the ligaments are the intelligent part of the body. They allow the body to do smarter movements and perform smarter activities. Some main ligaments you want to think about, one is Cooper's ligament. So it's a fascia that goes inside your pelvic floor called Cooper's, but directly outside the pelvis, it attaches to your pectineus. And the pectineal fascia, it's literally the same fascia. They just change the name as you go inside. So that's an important one. You also have your pubofemoral ligament, which means it's a ligament that goes from your hip towards your pubis, right? Which goes inside the pubis, also with the Cooper's ligament. Then you have a big gigantic ligament called your sacro rectal, genital, vesicle, pubic ligament, it's a white line. So it goes from the spots from the sacrum to the rectum, genital, your genitalia vesicle, your bladder, pubic, pubic bone ligament, across that same ligament attaches to your all, which is your anterior longitudinal ligament. It's a ligament that runs at the front of your spine. So that sacrorectogenic vesicle, pubic ligament all runs all the way up to your skull. And on the way up to the skull, it also diverts and connects to your diaphragm. So you have now a bunch of muscles, a bunch of ligaments, a bunch of fascia that dictate how well the pelvic floor is balanced. So since the health, strength and mobility of your soft tissue dictates how well your body functions and stays in place, then all those areas I just talked about need to make sure that they're balanced. Now I want to divert a little bit to One main area that involves all these areas I'm talking about, and that's your SI joint. So I did a bigger video on this and I'll attach it to the end screen so you can click on it and also put the link in description. But your SI joint, which stands for sacroiliac joint, is a space on either side that looks like two little boomerangs like that between your sacrum, which is a bone triangle bone in the middle, and. And your ilium, your hip bones. That SI joint has a pure movement called positive torsion and negative torsion, which is a tilting forward or tilting back. But it has a lot of pathological ways it can move to keep you moving in your life. Because the body doesn't care too much about doing things right. It just cares about doing it, doing the activity you want to do. So it will cheat to get there. But if your SI joint is off, your whole pelvis, and for this video, your pelvic floor is off. So I won't go into detail. Now, you can watch a video later on about all that, but that's a very important area to make sure you stay balanced for your pelvic floor. Are you actively incorporating a pelvic floor routine into your strength, mobility and longevity program? Let me know in the comments. So how do you start working with the pelvic floor? The best place to start is with the ligaments. Like I mentioned before, the ligaments are the intelligent part of the body. So the smarter and healthier the ligaments, the smarter and healthy, healthier. Excuse me, your body. It's important to do this first, because if you just jump straight into some sort of stretch or exercise without really respecting ligaments, then you're never going to have the potential really to do that correctly. Because the information that's passing between your body and your brain is not great, is not the best. So focusing on ligaments is the best place to start. Now, I don't know how other people work on ligaments, but for the osteopathic way, the way I work is that you have a lot of ligaments, okay? So just quickly, you have your anterior sacroiliac ligaments, you have two of them. You have your posterior sacroiliac ligaments, you have basically four of them. You have your iliolumbar ligaments from your spine down your hip. If your pubic ligament, you get that white line I talked about. So you want to be specific, just like the muscles and working different ligaments. The best way I know how is through osteopathic Manual therapy using pumping and double TLS techniques. This allow for the restarting or to make the fluid inside the ligaments better. The fascial liquid, the prm, PRM liquid. And also allows for the proprioceptors, which are little computers in your body, to be turned on. Because with this new flow, to help normalize the tissue and help bring nutrition and take away waste. And with these smarter computers now, the ligaments become more healthy. In conjunction, you can also do some exercises with that. So the best exercise I know to work with the ligaments and the joints is Aldoa. Again, I've done a video or a couple videos on that, too, which you can find in my profile. But an Eldoa is an exercise that allows these joints, these ligaments, to open, strengthen, become healthier, and more importantly for now, to turn on these proprioceptors. Now, it won't get all the ligaments I talked about, but it'll get a lot of them. And you can do a lot of good on your own. It's probably best to combine the two, but you can do a lot on your own just with the Eldoas. Now, as you're working on the ligaments through exercises and through treatment, you also want to work on the muscles, right? So all those muscles I talked about at the beginning of the video, you want to work in their pure movements. You want to work on that piriformis, the obturator internus, the glute max, more toward the medial fibers, the psoas, potentially. You want to work these both in strengthening and stretching. They work together. So it's not an either or thing. You do both. This is supported by Hill's muscle model. Hill's muscle model says a muscle works best if you work with three parts as one. You work with the muscle fibers. Sorry about that. You work with the fascia that surrounds the muscle, and you work with the ligament that is formed from the fascia that surrounds the muscle that goes into the ligament. And you want to work these with the fascia in mind, obviously, because that fascia is going to allow you to work that muscle with Hill's muscle model more effectively. But it's also going to allow you to work holistically because as that fascia goes out, right? So if it goes from the muscle fibers, the fascia out into a ligament, that ligament connects to a bone, but it doesn't connect to the bone. It connects to the periosteum, which is the skin around the bone. And now you can extrapolate that out, because as that bone goes out, you have more ligaments that connect to it, which go to more muscles. You have tendons that connect to it, which is also fascia that go to joint, which is also fascia. So just keep thinking about expands out, because you can say you have one fascia that connects all your body and goes a bunch of different ways. So you want to work on the ligaments, you want to work on the muscles, but via the fascia by strengthening and stretching. That's how you start to work with your pelvic floor. And now as you work through that, now you can do Kegels. This includes everybody, men and women. But now you want to do Kegels by just doing a Kegel. So when you can charge your pelvic floor, you want to contract just it. So for women, when you contract your pelvic floor, it's like you're trying to stop your pee. For men, it's a little bit grosser. You have to imagine you're taking a suppository up your rectum, so you want to squeeze it to pull it up. It's not me. It's the way the anatomy is. That's a pure Kegel pelvic floor contraction, whatever you want to call it. But just like any muscle, when the body can't do it properly, it wants to cheat, right? It wants to cheat because it thinks that the cheat will accomplish what you want. But we know differently, so we do a Kegel or pelvic floor contraction. You want to make sure you're not using your glutes or your adductors, which is your inner thigh muscles or your abs or your diaphragm. So you want to go through a little program to teach yourself to only use the pelvic floor. A good basic outline of that program is you do a pelvic floor contraction, and you learn to do that. You hold it for like 5, 10 seconds. You do that for a while. Now you've learned to do just that. Now you want to separate the pelvic floor from the different areas. So as an example, you contract your glutes, then you contract your pelvic floor, then you release just your glutes, then you release just your pelvic floor. You'd move on to. After you master that, you move on to your adductors, abs, and also diaphragm to separate all those together. Because now when you go to contract your pelvic floor, you contract just your pelvic floor. That's very important, because now your body's not cheating. And putting yourself in position. And then a little side note, that's very important for women because when you're trying to give birth, for the pregnant women now, when they want you to contract or just release your pelvic floor, you're using just that and you're not using something else. I hope you got some good information on this video. I know it was a lot. I'm trying to condense it into easy pieces. You don't need to remember all the different muscles and all the different fascia. What you need to remember is, oh, look, it's more than just my pelvic floor. It's all these other muscles, these fascia, all these different parts of my body that contribute to the pelvic floor. If you want more support on not just pelvic floor strengthening, but to strengthen and mobilize your body to get out of pain and further into this, into function, then I'd be glad to help. I've got a private Facebook group where you can use the description in the link in the description to sign up. It's an interactive way to participate. I also have a link in the description for a free download, a free ebook. It's four steps. How to live your best life to balance your body. Again in the description and then also in the description I have a link for a complimentary consultation with me where we talk about where you want to go. I try and show you where the holes may be in your program and only if I feel like you're a good fit. While I offer my services to you either in house here in Santa Fe or I've got a personalized online program that's helped a lot of people too. So I hope you liked it. Give it a thumbs up if you do. I'll see you next week.