Stop Crossing Your Legs While Sitting!
Part 2: Pelvic Floor Dysfunction
Crossing your legs rotates your pelvis!
In last month’s blog, we discussed the pelvis as a bony ring and its relationship to back pain and postural dysfunction. If you haven’t read this yet, feel free to re-visit our previous blogs to catch up on the conversation. If you are joining me for the first time today, we will discuss how pelvic rotation relates to pelvic floor dysfunction.
When the pelvic ring is twisted or distorted, let’s say from chronically crossing your legs while sitting, your muscles will follow the distortion. When muscles are not in their proper position, they could encounter a challenge when trying to activate and stabilize your body – especially when we talk about the core! If your pelvic floor is distorted and not firing correctly, we lose a huge part of our postural stability.
Low core or no core? One step closer to back pain
If we compound this with poor low core (transverse abdominus) activation, strength, or endurance we are well on the road towards postural dysfunction. What comes next is a whole string of conditions. Low back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, hip pain, poor balance, decreased strength…and the list goes on! Does any of this sound familiar?
When we talk about core stability, there are three areas I focus on during physical therapy treatment. The Transverse abdominus, the back/multifidi muscles, and the pelvic floor.
Now of course I am generalizing with this statement, and there are other postural muscles that are very important in creating postural stability, but for the purposes of this blog let’s focus on the three I just mentioned.
The Triangle with 2 sides: How pelvic floor dysfunction begins.
If we take one of these three muscles out of the equation, then we are working with a triangle that only has 2 sides! Your stability decreases quickly as the other two muscle groups must take over and distribute the force of 3 muscle groups between 2. Once this happens, the muscles can become overloaded or full of trigger points and incapable of working to their fullest extent.
It is here that we start experiencing pelvic floor dysfunction. This could include pelvic floor tightness, pelvic pain, constipation, incontinence, prolapse, or coccyx pain (among others!). Thankfully, the treatment for most of these conditions starts with something as simple as fixing your posture! A simple postural assessment tells us a lot about what could be occurring at the pelvic floor before we would even consider performing an internal evaluation to further assess the pelvic floor muscles.
Restore your posture, restore your pelvic floor!
Physical therapy for restoring posture can be very simple yet also challenging by making long standing changes to your body. For example, it might be easy to put your body into a “normal” position, but hard to hold, because it is a different position than what your body is used to. Don’t worry, we all go through this when fixing our posture – just keep working on it daily a little bit at a time. A few fixes a day goes a long way!
When posture is restored, the pelvic floor has a better chance of activating properly. At the same time, the low core and back muscles start to fire again. This is a big step in the right direction in decreasing pelvic floor symptoms if they are caused by tightness or by poor activation patterns.
If you are experiencing any of these symptoms and are curious if they are influenced by the pelvic floor, feel free to contact our office located in the Flatiron District of Manhattan to schedule a free consultation!
