Below is a transcription of my video. You’ll see a few run-on sentences, but you get the picture. 😉

Hi! I’m Dustienne.

Let’s have a chat about what happens naturally when we inhale and exhale from the perspective of the diaphragm and the pelvic floor.

Here is my dear friend Penelope. She will demonstrate the pelvic floor perspective and if you can visualize on top up here is the diaphragm. It’s shaped like a dome, jellyfish, umbrella. As we inhale, that will flatten down toward the feet, that will press down on the pelvic and abdominal organs, and allow the pelvic floor to release towards the feet. As we exhale, the pelvic floor will come back up and then the diaphragm will also come back up.

We use this natural movement to either enhance relaxation or enhance contraction. So, if I’m working with somebody with pelvic pain, back pain, hip pain and we wanted to practice relaxing the pelvic floor, what we would focus on, from a visualization perspective is during the inhalation, we can imagine the pelvic floor is releasing.

If I wanted to work on somebody who was trying to increase coordination of the pelvic floor muscles to contract then we could ask that person to visualize or practice the contraction on the exhalation. So, we would inhale and release and then exhale and contract the pelvic floor. That of course we could also tie into the abdominals that work at the same time as the pelvic floor.

So, this is a nice retraining tool. We know that we walk around using our diaphragm, using our pelvic floor independent of if we’re inhaling or exhaling, but this is another way to increase motor control and increase awareness about what is happening naturally at the pelvic floor and perhaps use this as a visualization to help increase relaxation.

I hope you found this helpful!

Have a lovely day.