Pelvic Floor Health Redefined

Summit Introduction and Recap 0:00

- Everyone is Jana here back with you for day number four of our summit and our fourth mini session together. Now we touched on my pain journey and hopefully there was some inspiration or some information that resonated with you on day one we've touched on the breathwork and the spinal movements really that I learned that were my starting point for my own healing journey. We played yesterday with a morning ritual that I have with my elixir and I hope that you find ways to get good nutrition and good energy and good frequency into your body so you can start your day and today I want to share another part of my life with you, which is my passion for women's health and pelvic floor fitness.

Now I'm the mom of three boys, you're gonna meet them in a couple of days.

Pelvic Floor Health for Everyone 1:01

We're gonna, they join me On day six actually of these many sessions and so you're gonna get a chance to, you know, meet them. And we actually talked about mindset from the perspective of, you know, teenagers and young adults and so my boys now are 17, 19 and 22. And when you have a baby, I don't care if it's cesarean section for a natural birth, even if you have not had a baby, um going through menopause young, you know, Tween age kids um can have pelvic floor issues, young kids with bed wedding.

Like what we don't realize is that pelvic floor function impact every single body and like I said right from you know, the 10 year old that's still wetting the bed to the guy with erectile dysfunction to the post menopausal woman to the prenatal woman to everybody in between. And that's why I have, you know, taken my knowledge and my education and I have really rooted it into this soapbox of pelvic floor health because I feel like we are conditioned to believe that as we age certain things just happen to us and there's absolutely nothing we can do about it. We watch commercials for incontinence products and we now see the woman in the rarely tailored business suit, We see the construction guys, we see the rock stars.

So all these people just like us who go into the grocery store into the incontinence product ill. And now these newly designed adult diapers are supposed to make us think that that's the solution.

Research, Movement, and the Problem with Silence 2:56

The incontinence product industry is a 20 plus billion dollar industry and here's I had lots of, I call them my Jerry Maguire moments. You guys know that movie Jerry Maguire where it's Tom Cruise and Renee Zellweger. And she has, she says to him at one point you had me at hello, those are my Jerry Maguire moments. One of my Jerry Maguire moments in my career has been work that I did with Dr. Bruce Crawford who was a Euro gynecologist from Reno, Nevada. Dr. Crawford has a flagship research study that showed that in 90% of pelvic floor dysfunction. The dysfunction was not medical in nature, the dysfunction was movement slash fitness related.

Because guess what? Everyone, this part of your body is muscles, it's fashionable tissue, it's nerves, just like everywhere else in your body. And if you don't work to strengthen your arms, your legs, um you know, the body is going to be functioning at a less than optimal level. The exact same thing with your pelvic floor and see. I would do these workshops. It was before their webinars and I would do these workshops at my studio and they would sell out and there would be a massive women and I would go through the workshop and I would teach and I would ask questions and it would never take me too long before I realized like it felt like I was there was just crickets out there. Like I would make eye contact with people and they would look away. I would ask if there were any questions and there were no questions and this happened over and over and over again and you know, so what else happened over and over again was after the webinar, there would be a line up of women to talk to me one on one or I would have an inbox full of emails. I was like why can't we talk about this?

Why can't we why can't why can't we even use the anatomy? We talk about down there. I got a problem down there, down where at your feet, your knees to redefine pelvic floor health so that people can start talking about it in a way,

Breath, Diaphragm, and Pelvic Floor Connection 5:11

because guess what remember that stat that I gave you from Dr. Crawford's research that 90% of pelvic floor dysfunction can be fixed with proper movement, proper posture. And you do not need to get on a surgical table to get a mesh piece of mesh put into your body to pin up your pelvic floor. And then in three years you're doing it again because we live on a planet with gravity and that mesh is gonna sag if you don't work the musculature. Alright, so here's what I know, I know that we don't talk about the pelvic floor the way we should. I know that we don't understand that the pelvic floor and our diaphragm, which is the main muscle of respiration are best friends.

And when we're not breathing properly, the pelvic floor over time is gonna be dysfunctional. We're not talking about that. And so I wanted to start talking about it when we take a big breath in through our nose, fill our belly with air. And when we exhale out of our mouth, we inhale through our nose. Our pelvic floor is at rest because our diaphragm has to get out of the way our diaphragm is. This muscle here, it's like a mushroom cap. All right, like an open umbrella and the crust of the rib cage.

And so when our lungs are filling with air, when we inhale the dive premise to get out of the way of those increasing volume in our lungs. And so at that point it's ducking under the way our pelvic floor is also kind of ducking, it's also descending a little bit. And then as we exhale and our lungs empty, the diaphragm rises back up into the crest of the rib cage. And guess who comes along for the ride? The pelvic floor? So they move together in this beautiful synergistic relationship, They really are best friends.

So guess what? Everyone When we were in high school and I was guilty of this too, laying on my bed in the late 80s and early 90s with my acid washed jeans with my coat hanger on my zipper, sucking my belly and zipping up my pants so that they could be as skin tight as possible. You remember those days? Right? Well, guess what, when we take space away from a part of our body, we're just forcing things have to go somewhere either up or down. So we're messing with the forces in our, our diaphragm and in the in the pelvic floor.

And so over time, Even now, the waist trainers that are so trendy are just like those skin tight acid wash jeans that we used to wear in the late 80s and early 90s and we're taking away space and we're adding unnecessary force intention into various parts of our body. And so when you understand that when you exhale out of your mouth that that pelvic floor is rising as the diaphragm is rising.

Beyond Kegels and Pelvic Floor Therapy 7:49

It's like an elevator lifting. I love teaching this concept that I call beyond the kegel. I feel like the kegel is a shortsighted way of attempting to get biofeedback or feeling in our pelvic floor. Right? Oftentimes a kegel is taught as stop the flow of urine. So do it with me, stop the flow of urine, start the flow of urine. Not literally, but just imagine stop the flow of urine, start the flow of urine and we go around and we do our kegels. And guess what happens for women who already have a hyper tonic floor too tight.

They are exacerbating the issue by stopping the flow of urine, stopping the flow of urine, stopping the flow of urine and getting tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter, creating more and more and more dysfunction. You're coughing or sneezing, you're laughing, you're peeing a little bit okay, you have pelvic floor pain, pain during intercourse. All those things are happening. You might even have constipation as a pelvic floor dysfunction. Symptom. Alright, so we're not learning how to how to descend. We're not learning the relaxed part in those muscles. On the other hand, women who have too much relaxation, it's called hip a tonic a lack of tone we need to learn the lift.

And what we're not told ever is that connecting to our breath is the start of giving, it's like giving cpr to our pelvic floor. It's simple, ladies and gentlemen, Because I think in the case of men, erectile dysfunction is in about 80-90% of the cases, a pelvic floor that's too tight. so blood can't get through the to the penis. It's like a rock wall, fluid does not go through a rock wall. I'm a huge, huge, huge proponent of pelvic floor physiotherapy. And when we're here this week and we're talking about mindset, we're talking about ending chronic stress and fatigue and burnout and that means that our body can almost make it or break it for us.

We can come to be very disconnected and very unhappy with our body because we don't understand or we bought into a paradigm that isn't actually true. All right. And so we can talk a lot more about this and you're gonna hear about the burnout to Bliss challenge that I'm gonna be inviting you to after the summit. You're gonna learn more about my coach ball for women and the Gooch ball for men, which happens to be a co branded product. This is my, one of my contributions to the world and how I show up to impact the lives of kids and men and women all over the world because when we have oxygen rich blood,

Breath as the First Step to Healing 10:39

nutrient rich blood to our pelvic floor the neural network in our brain can start to change and we can start to bring life back to that area of our body. We can bring confidence, we can bring sensuality and there are it's it's a part of our body that is very sacred. We can experience trauma in that area and as you heard from Dr. Aimie Apigian trauma is too much too soon or a lack of something for too long. We can have these traumatic feelings in the pelvic floor area for the reasons we're here, chronic stress can cause that trauma fatigue can cause that, cause that trauma and burnout can cause that trauma.

So if there's one thing you can do today for yourself before we wrap and then get into today's amazing line up of speakers, I want you to understand that your breath is the start to impacting your body in so many beautiful, glorious ways including pelvic floor health. Big breath in exhale out on the, on the exhale. Think of the drawing up, trying to squeeze and on the inhale it's the relaxation down and like I said, we're going to get into this a lot more in the in the challenge which I hope you will join me for, have an amazing day here at the medicine and Mindset Summit and we will see you tomorrow.