I am really excited about today because I have a special guest! Her name is Christina Jensen. She’s a doctor of physical therapy, and she specializes in pelvic health and holistic wellness. 

Pelvic health is one of the topics I have been wanting to touch on for you guys for a long time because, as you know, this podcast isn’t just about nutrition. It isn’t just about fitness. It is holistic. And I want to cover all things women’s health and anything that can improve your life and help you thrive instead of just survive. And pelvic health is one of those things that a lot of us don’t think about or don’t even realize exists for us. 

Everybody has a pelvic floor. 

But women, especially our pelvic floors, go through so much over the course of our lifespan with pregnancy and hormonal changes. 

Let’s talk about urinary incontinence. 

That can be frequency of urination or urgency that causes you to drop what you’re doing and do the little waddle to the bathroom and hope you make it on time. If you go to the bathroom to empty your bladder more than every two hours, that’s different from what we consider normal. That’s too much. And we can make changes there,

The body is amazing at accommodating whatever our normal behaviors are. So if we’ve taught our bladder that we need to go every 45 minutes, that’s what the bladder’s going to want us to do, and we can teach it new tricks as well.

Different Types of Pelvic Pain

That can be pain during intimacy, like vaginal pain. That can also be generalized pelvic pain. If you just kind of feel like you’ve got a headache in your low belly all of the time, that can be a muscular condition that a pelvic floor physical therapist can help with. Even just like low back pain, hip pain, and sciatica, all of that can have pelvic floor functions. People are always surprised to hear that Christina works with things like endometriosis, I.B.S., and even erectile dysfunction. All of that can be helped with a pelvic floor physical therapy program. 

If it’s interrupting your life, whatever it happens to be, especially for these topics that are so personal, we’ll joke about leaking on ourselves, or we’ll joke about having some of these other problems with our friends because it’s become so normalized for us. And it doesn’t need to be normal.

A lot of us are told by our doctors just to do kegel exercises. That’s what I’ve always heard. And there’s not a lot of explanation that goes with that. It’s kind of just like tighten and release, tighten and release. So when I started going through pelvic physical therapy, she was actually saying that is the opposite of what you need to be doing because you are so tense. The kegels are just exacerbating the situation. So she started giving me other things that I could do to relieve that. And one of the things that Christina told me that I thought was profound is that we hold a lot of our stress in our pelvic floor, which can come from just stress over life. It can come from childbirth, and it can come from adolescence, or any traumas we’ve experienced.

Stress is not something that we need to fear or avoid. 

Stress is part of being a biological organism. Stress is a natural part of life, and it’s actually beneficial to our physiology to experience low stress levels. It inspires our body to grow and adapt and get stronger. So it’s not about the stress itself. It’s about what we are doing with it. Do we have healthy coping mechanisms? Do we understand how it works? Do we understand how to recover from our stress so that we can cycle back around into our new strength? 

The pelvic floor is a really interesting set of muscles in the body because it receives innervation meaning communication from the nervous system. So it receives communication from our conscious nervous system, the stuff we do on purpose, and our autonomic system, which is our unconscious system. So as women, the pelvic area is an energy center that’s really important to our overall being. And so the accumulation of all these different things really adds up.

Rhythm Awareness

That means starting to understand how your body functions within your environment. So we’re thinking about your circadian rhythm. So we’re thinking about when you go to bed, how well are you sleeping? When do you wake up? Do you have a regular rhythm there? 

We need to learn about ourselves and get in touch with ourselves because that can be an uncomfortable area for a lot of people to explore. Unfortunately, we’re not taught that. We’re taught not even to use the words vulva and vagina, It’s a natural part of our body, and it needs care just like everything else does.

Action Steps

Masturbation is something that many women don’t fully understand how to incorporate into their life. And what I want everyone to know is that that is part of a healthy self-care routine. Masturbation is going to exercise those pelvic muscles. It’s going to get good blood flowing, which is going to be healthy for your tissues. It’s going to activate good hormones like oxytocin and estrogen. So chemically, you’re doing a healthy activity there.

Those of us who have daughters might have gotten messages from our parents, and they got messages from their parents that this is not something nice girls do. We need to hide this and don’t talk about it. We inadvertently pass those things down to our kids. So opening up this conversation can really help generations ahead of us.

Life is supposed to feel good at any age, and that’s what I’m in this for. I’m in this for the long haul, from adolescence to early menstruation, to pregnancy, to postpartum, and beyond. We deserve to enjoy our lives, and we deserve to be resilient women. And I think that pelvic floor physical therapy is a great tool in your toolbox to achieve that.