Embarrassed about leaking?

Pregnancy, episiotomy scars, weight gain, incorrect breathing mechanics and inactivity are all ways in which you can lose the strength of your pelvic floor.

You may leak, struggle to get an erection or have painful sex and it’s not because you are aging. Your pelvic floor is either too tight (and weak, often from overdoing kegels or simply having to hold on all the time!) or too slack and weak from a diaphragm that is not adequately descending towards your pelvis (most often because of poor posture).

From time to time I get an amazing result for such clients by simply addressing their jaw and, inevitably, the core. The pelvic floor and the jaw are, after all, two ends of the same tube and should be held in place by the spine and other core structures.

Tina (not her real name) came to me with this very problem. The moment she stopped participating in Pilates, she started leaking again. Disappointing. Strictly spoken formal exercise (Pilates and Yoga) should help us establish strength so that we can do more advanced classes as well as other types of exercise (like walking and jogging) without pain and embarrassment. And you should be able to take 2-4 weeks off exercise classes without experiencing your old problems. Not so if you have developed compensation patterns over a lifetime of bumps, accidents, falls and surgeries. Your muscles may simply have ‘forgotten’ how to behave normally because it found a new way that worked, at least until now. This new pattern is now stored in the Motor Control Center of your brain and will, in most cases, not change, no matter how hard you try. I can, however, help you change these types of compensation patterns.

After just one jaw treatment (not every case delivers such quick results, I should mention!) Tina’s pelvic floor stabilised. Backed up with a two more treatments and a few weeks of Pilates twice a week for less than two months, Tina is now jogging her daughter to school without a leak!

Belly button piercing = inhibited back muscles

A belly button piercing is such a normal thing. Ever thought that it can be responsible for your back pain? Ask Jeanne!

Jeanne (not her real name) certainly lived a full life – like a cat with seven lives! During her first visit I treated an old hip injury that inhibited her belly muscles and then searched around for the reason her back muscles (the multifidus which stabilise your sacral and lumbar vertabra) tested weak.

Scars are often the culprit of weak muscle tests because it can quite physically distort the connective tissue (the fascia) of our bodies – like a shirt that you tucked in poorly. I suspected three belly scars from key hole surgery to be the culprits but the noticed a much older and more prominent scar: her belly button piercing! Jeanne shrugged it off as ‘an old scar’ but for me, this is the more important information. Old injuries are responsible for the oldest compensation patterns. We can have hundreds of these! We need to find what is the most impactful.  

When I tested Jeanne’s belly button piercing against her multifidus, boom, strong went her back muscles! At the same time Jeanne’s glutes switched on – see her response after her treatment (if you haven’t read it yet in an earlier post):

“I’m literally blown away by today! Thank you so much! What you do is a coming together of lots of things I’ve seen and heard and learnt along the way but wow!

…I’ve noticed that my glutes are firing when I do things. I don’t think they ever fired when I move before!! I did realise that I had no core when I was swimming age 16… They used to laugh at my total inability to do burpees and sit ups.

…So this morning my glutes are awake and telling me so!

…I’m still processing your marvellous skills…”

Old injuries = today’s pain

How many times have I heard clients say: “Oh, that is an old scar from when I was 15.” This happens at almost every session. People can’t believe that such an old injury can hold the key to the pain they experience today.

Just this week Jeanne (not her real name) visited me for a sore hip. It turned out that an injury at the age of 6 caused a lot of her troubles over her lifetime. In addition, while testing Jeanne’s stability, I noticed that she could not stabilise when I ‘pushed’ /perturbed her on her upper chest. I was perplexed and although I knew she gets really tight shoulders she did not report an injury related to her shoulders… And then her eyes lit up:

“Oh, I forgot to say, I broke my sternum (breastbone) as a young adult jumping from a crazy high distance into a river!”

I had to laugh at how easy it is to forget some injuries (like another client who forgot to mention her two hip replacements!).

I tested Jeanne’s pectoral / chest muscles and there was just NO strength! Then, when I tested if her sternum was involved in the weakness, boom, strong went her pectorals. This injury I will treat another time as too much intervention at one time can overwhelm the nervous system.