POSTURE AS AN EVALUATION TOOL
If you have ever wondered if poor posture and body positions during your ADL’s (activities of daily living) can cause changes in your pelvic floor, keep reading.
As a pelvic floor physical therapist, one of the first things I notice about my patients on day 1 of meeting them is their posture. I take note of the way they stand, how they sit, how their head is positioned relative to their torso, how their pelvis is positioned, and most importantly…how they move. Of course, a pelvic floor evaluation and treatment involves a more involved look of the body, but this is where it starts.
HOW DOES POSTURE RELATE TO THE WAY I BREATHE?
Posture is quite an interesting topic, as it tends to be one of the first treatment interventions that I use with my pelvic floor patients. Personally I find it very easy to teach, but difficult to implement. Think about it, if the body is used to doing something for a long period of time and has become relatively efficient in those movements, why would it want to change?
Sometimes pelvic floor dysfunction can be corrected just by correcting they way someone breathes. The reason this happens is because the diaphragm and the pelvic floor work as sort of a “piston” with our breath. If you are not allowing proper coordination of the pelvic floor and the diaphragm, you might create trigger points in the pelvic floor or core muscles and end up with a variety of pathologies. Some of the most common ones I see include pelvic floor pain, constipation, and incontinence.
POSTURE, PELVIC FLOOR ACTIVATION, AND URINARY INCONTINENCE
Recently I had come across an article by Kyeongjin Lee that mentioned how posture can affect the pelvic floor, more specifically how it relates to decreasing urinary incontinence. The beginning of the paper investigates the potential relationship between the position of the pelvis and pelvic floor activation and suggests that moving your ankle into various positions could impact the activation of postural and pelvic floor muscles.
In the end, this author found that pelvic floor activation was the highest in a standing position with your feet lifted such that you are standing on your heels. In the PT world, we refer to this ankle position as dorsiflexion. They do mention however that this study would be more beneficial using real time movements instead of a static posture because this relates more to the way we move naturally in life.
BALANCE WITH YOUR CORE, NOT YOUR JOINTS!
Either way, this got me thinking about poor postures and their impact on the pelvic floor. In the previously mentioned study, they also mention that women with urinary incontinence had more difficulty with balance. Without proper activation of the low core muscles, we are unable to support our body on one leg and instead fall back on using our joints to do the work for us. Many times during treatment, I will implement balance work either on it’s own or as a progression to glute and leg strengthening.
These interventions help to not only integrate our core to our movements, but they also improve our postures and directly impact the forces on our pelvic floor during daily life.
If you believe your posture could be contributing to a pelvic floor disorder, please give the clinic a call so we can chat more about your specific situation and see if pelvic floor physical therapy is right for you!
