Why a tight pelvic floor is not a strong pelvic floor.

“But if my muscle is tight, why am I still leaking?”


This is a great question. And the best way to answer it is to imagine we are talking about a different group of muscles in your body, such as your neck muscles. 

Most people will have experienced a sore and painful neck at some point in their life. And when you’ve had that sore neck, it’s often hard to turn your head, or you do so with trepidation, much more slowly than usual. Well, I bet during this uncomfortable time, you’ve also reached up to rub your sore neck and possibly touched the major muscle groups that are responsible for these neck movements. Did you ever notice how tight and hard they seemed under your fingertips? 


So, we have a sore neck, we have tight muscles and we have loss of function. This is exactly what is happening in your pelvic floor. 

Most often, something will have occurred in the pelvis to cause your pelvic floor muscles to became overactive and tight. This incident may have been, for example: a painful experience with constipation, a history of recurrent urinary tract infections or thrush, or an uncomfortable sexual experience. As a result, sometimes the pelvic floor muscles will go into spasm, or the individual may begin holding tension in the pelvic floor muscles as a way of subconsciously providing protection to the area. 


This causes the muscles to become short and stiffened. When muscles are held in a shortened position, they have less ability to contract and perform their function in a responsive and timely manner. 


If we go back to the example of our neck; turning your head (which is the function of the neck muscles), may be reduced, and will be performed more slowly in the presence of tight, stiff neck muscles. In the case of the pelvic floor, the ability to engage and contract to support the bladder and occlude the urethra (which is the function of the pelvic floor), will also be reduced, and will be performed more slowly when the muscles are tight and stiff, and this will lead to urinary leakage.

So, if this is the case, asking this woman to do lots of pelvic floor exercises focused on squeezing and holding is not going to improve her urinary leaking. In fact, it may make it worse, or give her a new condition due to even more spasming in her pelvic floor muscles.

Instead, what will assist this woman is if she can learn to downtrain the muscle tension. This can be taught and practiced and once we have a healthy muscle, sitting at a good resting length, we can then teach appropriate functional recruitment of the pelvic floor which will lead to long lasting continence.