Pelvic floor physiotherapy NZ aims to reduce and eliminate your symptoms by improving function through lifestyle changes, exercises, education, and hands-on treatment. This therapy entails evaluating and treating a group of muscles involved in the bowel, urinary and sexual functions. Increased urgency and frequency, incontinence, retention, and pelvic pain can all result from these muscles not working properly.
Here are five things you should know about your pelvic floor health.
1. The Pelvic Floor Is A Component Of Your Core
The core is made up of much more than just the abdominal muscles. The core is a region of the body that extends from the diaphragm to the pelvic floor. As a result, your core muscles encompass your abdominal muscles, pelvic floor muscles, low back muscles, and diaphragm.
These muscles collaborate to support your abdominal contents. As a result, we want all aspects of your core to work properly. We will assess all aspects of the core and work on exercises to improve core function during pelvic floor physio.
2. It’s Not Just About Kegels
When your pelvic floor muscles are frail, you may experience signs like prolapse, incontinence, and urinary urgency and frequency. If the pelvic floor is noticed to be weak, Kegels or pelvic floor boosting exercises can help alleviate these symptoms. Even so, depending on your signs, there may be better solutions than Kegels.
The pelvic floor muscles, like any other muscle, could become tight. You may experience signs including pelvic pain, bowel emptying, a frail or hesitant stream, and pain either before or after sexual intercourse, in this case. The important thing is to have a strong pelvic floor rather than a tight pelvic floor. If your pelvic floor muscles are overly tight, relaxation exercises and gentle stretches can help release them, allowing you to enhance your symptoms.
3. Pelvic Floor Physio Can Benefit Anyone
Physiotherapy can help anyone who has pelvic floor dysfunction. While certain groups are more likely to experience pelvic floor symptoms, these symptoms can affect anyone. Here are a few examples of who might benefit from pelvic floor physio.
- Prenatal And Postpartum
This is one of the most prevalent occasions when pelvic floor issues arise. With a growing baby, labour, and postpartum recovery, women’s bodies undergo significant changes in a short period. People may experience pain in their tailbone, low back, pelvis, and hips. They may also encounter incontinence, urgency, heaviness and frequency, as well as pain during sexual intercourse. All of these symptoms can be alleviated with pelvic floor physio.
- Post Menopause
Women’s oestrogen levels will drop significantly during menopause. It turns out that oestrogen is essential for maintaining optimal pelvic floor function. As a result, women experiencing menopause may experience signs including bulging, heaviness, incontinence, increased frequency and urgency, and pelvic pain. In conjunction with your doctor’s treatments, pelvic floor physiotherapy NZ can significantly improve these symptoms.
- Post Surgery
It is common to have pelvic floor issues after having abdominal or pelvic surgery. This could be due to the surgical procedure or prolonged catheterisation. Typically, post-surgery physiotherapy NZ will aim to reduce pain and improve scar mobilisation.
- Men
While any male can have pelvic floor symptoms, the main triggers of pelvic floor dysfunction in men are chronic pelvic pain, post-surgical, chronic prostatitis, and post-prostatectomy. Men may experience symptoms such as incomplete bladder or bowel emptying, a slow, weak stream, pelvic pain, incontinence, and erectile dysfunction. Education, manual techniques, and exercises can help to alleviate these symptoms.
4. What To Expect From Pelvic Floor Physio Sessions
Your Physiotherapist will take a comprehensive history during the assessment. This will be followed by an external exam, which will typically include a check of your posture, flexibility, and strength in the areas of your low back, hips, and pelvis. Following that, an external and internal exam of the pelvic floor muscles may be performed.
With women, this will be done vaginally and rectally, and with men, it will be done rectally. While an internal exam is likely to be suggested and will yield valuable information about your pelvic floor muscles, it is not required if you are in acute pain or are uneasy with the procedure. An individualised treatment plan will be implemented based on the assessment findings. Treatment may include counselling and education, as well as exercises and manual therapy.
5. Is It Going To Be Painful?
The Physiotherapist’s goal is to enhance your symptoms, so while some of the treatment approaches may be uncomfortable, the goal is not to create a painful response. The Physiotherapist will look for what is causing the signs during the assessment. For example, bending over may cause pain in your low back, and the Physiotherapist may request to see this movement to evaluate how your back is moving and why you are experiencing pain with that movement.
While some pain symptoms may be reproduced, this shouldn’t aggravate your signs or cause you additional pain after the session. During treatment sessions, some hands-on techniques may be used to relieve your symptoms, which may cause some mild discomfort, but they must not be painful. The same principles pertain to the Physiotherapist’s home exercises and techniques. Although some mild discomfort may happen during the exercises, you should not experience pain during or after the home exercises.
