5 Functions Of The Pelvic Floor - Episode 8
In this episode, I will discuss the 5 main functions of the pelvic floor.
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Dr. Kari: You. Welcome to the Moron Pelvic Health Podcast. Hi, I'm your host, Dr. Carrie Roberts. On this show, we will be discussing a variety of things regarding your pelvic health. These conversations will be a mix of education, personal experiences, and a blend of tips you can apply to have a healthier pelvis. The goal of this show is to normalize conversations around pelvic health and help women stop suffering in silence. So there are a ton of things that the pelvic floor does, but just like I did in a couple of episodes back where I put things into buckets, in the pelvic floor world, we put things into five buckets. We actually call them the five s's of the pelvic floor, or the five functions of the pelvic floor. So just to run through them really quick, we have sphincter or sphinteric function, stability, support, sexual function, and sump pump. So that's it in a nutshell. Of course, I'm going to dig into it a little deeper. And this is primarily a podcast. Thank you for listening. If you are watching or have the option to watch, you may want to swing on over to YouTube because I've got my model here and I'm going to be using the model to explain a little bit throughout this discussion. Now, before we get into it, the first thing I want to do is actually talk about where the pelvic floor is located. If we're sitting on a chair, you're sitting on those sit bones, those sit bones which are part of the pelvis. Okay, that's here, there's one on left, one on the left and one on the right. Then towards the front of that we have our pubic bone. And then at the base of our spine, we have our sacrum, which is also known as the tailbone, and then the coccyx. So if you're sitting in a chair and someone was going to look right underneath the chair, or if you're watching the video and you want to look at the pelvis, we're going to look at it right there. So we've got the pubic bone here. We've got the sacrum and the coccyx here. And then we have our sit bones here in those two places. And that diamond shape between the two sit bones, the pubic bone and the sacrum and coccyx is where the pelvic floor lives. It's called the pelvic floor because it is at the bottom. It is the bottom of our core, or the floor of our core. A lot of times people refer to the diaphragm as the ceiling of our core. The pelvic floor is the floor of our core. So the first thing that it does is it has sphincteric function. So a sphincter is a muscle that is round shaped, and when it tightens, it closes up, doesn't let contents pass through, and when it relaxes, it opens up and contents can pass through. We have sphincters all over our body and the two that we're going to talk about today are part of the pelvic floor. We have a sphincter around the urethra, which controls bowel excuse me, which controls bladder function. And then we have a sphincter around the anus which gives us our bowel support. So that's one of the essays, sphincteric function. The next one is support. Now, the pelvic floor muscles live on the inside of our hip girdle and it's shaped kind of like a bowl, okay? So just like a bowl, you put cereal in the bowl, in the pelvic floor. In that bowl we have organs in there, we've got our rectum towards the back, you have the bladder towards the front. And for women, we have our uterus and our vagina in the middle and it gives those organs support, right? It's a bowl, it's shaped kind of like a hammock and it gives support to the bowels, the bladder, the urethra and the vagina. And when it's supporting, well, you don't really don't think about it. If you have any issues with support, then you might develop something like a bladder prolapse, erectoceal or assistocyl. So that's the second function. The third function is stability. Notice I said it lives inside the pelvic girdle. It is between our hip bones and it gives stability. Our pelvic floor attaches to our spine back here. It attaches to our hip bones in the front and on the sides and it even shares some connective tissue with other muscles in our spine. So the pelvic floor helps give stabine support excuse me, stability to our lower back, our hips, and it's very important. So stability is something we need. We need those muscles to give that secondary support to our hips and back when we're moving and lifting and things like that. The third thing that it gives us, or the third function of the pelvic floor is actual sexual dysfunction. So when you think about things, when you have arousal, when you have pleasure, when you have climax, you have sensations associated with that, there's lubrication and things like that. All of that is going and controlling and functioning from the pelvic floor. When you have a climax or orgasm and you feel that rhythmic motion, that's the pelvic floor muscle doing what it needs to do so that you can have enjoyment and pleasure. So that is what it does from a sexual perspective. And then the last one, which I think is the most interesting is actually the sump pump because the sump pump helps us, or it's sump pump, but it's really part of helps with the Lymphatic system. Our Lymphatic system in our body eliminates waste product and the pelvic floor helps the Lymphatic system do that. So there are a ton of things that the pelvic floor does, but in a nutshell it does those five x's five S's, the sphincter function, sexual function, stability, support and sump pump. So there you have it. Thank you for coming here. I would love for you to leave a comment, please leave a review. Please subscribe so that you never miss a new episode, and I will be back next week to share more about the Pelvic floor. 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