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Pelvic Floor and Core Health
TRAIN AND FORTIFY YOUR PELVIC FLOOR & CORE
The nucleus of what we call, “the core” is the pelvic floor, which includes the sex organs, rectum, and perineum; the secondary core encompasses the low belly (just above the pubic bone), abdominals, obliques, and back.
A supple, well-fortified core is crucial for proper alignment/posture, internal organ tonicity, continence, healthy sexual function, and overall vitality. Follow these steps to familiarize yourself with the area:
Sit in a chair with your feet flat on the floor, about hip-width apart.
Rest your hands in your lap and keep your back in neutral, neither slumped nor arched.
Imagine drawing your sitting bones together as you draw your tailbone toward your pubic bone. You’ll notice that the muscles of the sex organs, rectum, and the perineum become activated.
Maintain this activation as you hollow out your low belly (just above the pubic bone) as if you intended to hug your lumbar from the inside of your body. Now activate the rest of the secondary core, as if you were preparing to lift 10 lb. weights.
Use these muscles for lifting, bicycling or walking uphill, hiking, yoga, climbing stairs, rock climbing, abdominal workouts, and any other application that requires you to secure the heaviest part of your body–your torso.
Visualize your torso as a paper grocery bag and your internal organs as the groceries; that’s a fairly heavy load. Now imagine swinging the bag with moderate force. In order to keep the bag intact, you’d want to hold it from the bottom–that’s your pelvic floor. Engaging your body’s deepest muscular power source prevents the full weight of your torso from being cast down into your hip, knee, and ankle joints.
If you were climbing a hill with this ”heavy bag”, you’d want to hold it from the bottom, front, back, and sides–sex organs, rectum, perineum, low belly, plus your abdominals, obliques, and back, all working together to stabilize your core. In yoga, this muscle group is referred to as the “old age muscles”. If we offer extra support to this region as the years go by, we can preserve our strength and agility. In other words, we can decide whether we want to be old bags or new bags!
Women’s Online Core Care Chair Yoga is a fun and energizing way to train these muscles, and the workouts tone you up fast. Breathwork is emphasized to rev up your metabolism and detoxify your cells. Energy centers are stimulated to balance mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects.
After you get a few classes under your belt, you can select the poses you’re most comfortable with and try them at home. They can also serve to break up a sedentary workday because they’re designed to be performed in a chair.