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Rachel Welch is a women’s health advocate, postnatal fitness expert, and pioneer. Her life-elevating postnatal fitness plan empowers women with the knowledge and skills to understand, heal, and embody motherhood from the inside out.
She frequently partners with physicians and pelvic floor therapists to treat and strengthen pre and postnatal health conditions.
With Rachel’s Revolution Motherhood app, moms receive support, enthusiasm, positivity, and motivation at each stage of their pre-natal and postnatal journey.
The first thing to know about your pelvic floor is that it is connected to the rest of your body, in particular, to your abdominal muscles (transversus abs, or TVA) and diaphragm (the big muscle that sits inside your ribcage and helps you breathe). Your pelvic floor relies on deep breathing and upper abdominal strength to perform its anatomical function of supporting your pelvic organs.
The 'pelvic floor,' or PF, is defined by a group of muscles, fascia, ligaments, and tendons that form a lower body diaphragm supporting your bladder, rectum, lower intestines, and uterus. This pelvic floor system connects your pubic, tail, and inner sitting bones. This is a brief anatomical overview, but it helps form a picture of how a hammock of support is suspended underneath you and forms the gateway to your trunk.
This might shock you: Your pelvic floor does not respond well to tons of squeezing kegels as if you were doing bicep curls. It wants to relax and release, which is 50% of its function — to relax to allow for elimination. It also wants to be supportive and resilient, like a springy trampoline that can stretch against sudden increased pressure like sneezing and coughing but rebound back into its neutral position of supporting your pelvic organs and continence.
This dynamic between tension and relaxation is part of a bigger picture of intra-abdominal pressure (IAP) that spans your lungs, diaphragm, core muscle system, and pelvic floor.
Understanding IAP will help you feel how much the pelvic floor will spontaneously begin recovering when you focus on the muscles above the pelvis, most notably, your transversus abdominis, rectus abdominis, QL, and outer three gluteal muscles.
This integrated strength begins with deep breathing: full, 3-dimensional expansion followed by slow, relaxing exhales.
Deep breathing also has the added benefit of cultivating ease, relaxing pent-up mom tension, and awakening muscles that haven't been firing.
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See a pelvic floor specialized physical therapist (PT). They will most likely perform an internal and external exam to determine where the weakest links in the connection from your pelvic floor to your abs lie. Your PT can manually release tension and help you engage and release evenly through breath and mindful contractions. Your PT will also help you accurately diagnose function and/or injury. For instance, it is very common for some muscles to turn "on" post-birth, while others may be overstretched, tight, or slightly damaged. Conditions like incontinence and pain during intercourse are often created more by tight and restricted muscles than just 'weak' ones. Your PT will help you relax + zero in on a vaginal, rectal, or full pelvic floor kegle that integrates with your upper abdominal muscles. This is a crucial step to rehabilitating your abdominal muscles as well.
Begin to fuse your pelvic floor care and work into consistent Transversus Abdominal strength training. These exercises can be short and to the point - 10 minutes a day changes everything. Ensure your exercise program is progressive and building into full-body, integrated exercises. Essentially, don't stay with PT alone; you need to build strength while continuing to support your body + nervous system's rebalancing efforts. The daily activities of mom'ing take a very real toll on your body. Your recovery must include movements like soft foam rolling, foot/hand therapy, and neck and shoulder releases that dissolve daily tension to build reliable and consistent strength in your core, glutes, arms, back, and chest.
Translate your mindful fitness habits into daily mom activities. Take a moment to think about what activities you 'prepare' for because you know they are going to be hard or painful to perform; maybe those activities are folding the stroller, putting your baby into a high chair, bending over the crib, wearing your baby in a carrier, sneezing, bending over, standing to do the dishes, sitting or lying down and getting up.
Chronic pain tends to become a constant background reality that we adapt to as moms. It slowly creeps up on you and changes your sense of ease, increasing anxiety and decreasing patience.
So, begin to notice what activities you dread the most. Then, look at how to change those moments into easier activities performed from a functional core, generating benefits that go far beyond having a toned six-pack.
These mindful mom shifts will begin to alleviate chronic worry and stress in the mind, lift your overall mood, and improve your self-confidence, an essential component of maternal mental health and a key component to building resilient stamina and motivation to keep showing up for your personal workouts and self-care.
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