kegels

Stand & Sit for the Pelvic Floor

There are lots of people, especially women (and women who have had babies), who struggle to engage their pelvic floor. It can be hard to find and it’s not a muscle we’re taught about in school like our abs or biceps.

The muscles that make up your kegel (or pelvic floor) muscles connect to the base of your pelvis. They tie the tailbone, the public bone, the sits bones (those protruding bumps your feel in your buttocks when you sit down) together.

This is one of the best exercises I have found to start to feel and be able to understand where the pelvic floor is located. And it’s really easy to try.

Exercise:

Sit in a chair with your feet hip distance apart.
Stand up slowly.
Sit down slowly.
Repeat.

As you stand up, especially at the last moment when you are finally fully erect, notice how your sits bones come closer together. As you sit and your buttocks moves closer to the chair notice how they spread. It’s not a huge range of motion. If you can’t feel the difference in your body start by touching your sits bones with your hands and […]

Pilates on Kegels

So it has taken a while, but weeks ago a client asked what I thought was a really good question: Since Joseph Pilates first started using his exercises on men, did he really mention kegels?

It was a great question because even today we tend to associate kegels with women. Even though men have them (a question that some people also have). In the two books that I have read by Joseph Pilates, I did not notice him refer to the kegel muscles or the muscles of the pelvic floor. In asking other instructors, the answer I find most likely is that he probably favored the glutes (butt muscles) over the kegels. In comparison to the way we do the exercises today, Joseph Pilates overused the glute muscles. Today we try to focus on engaging and holding a gentle squeeze of the pelvic floor and abdominal muscles as opposed to squeezing the glutes to rock the pelvis.

That’s a good thing to remember the next time you do pelvic tilts during a warm up. When you rock from imprint to neutral you should be using your stomach, not your butt to […]