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Female Fitness - strengthening pelvic floor muscles
American Fitness, July, 2001 by Karen Asp
Why women should strengthen their pelvic floor muscles.
In the past decade, women have gotten pumped about strength training. We've flocked to free weights at gyms, bought strength training videos for home and hired personal trainers to guide us through the gluttony of squats, lunges, curls, crunches and push-ups. Yet we're not doing enough. Blame it on ignorance or embarrassment, but we've overlooked perhaps the most important muscle group in the female body: the pelvic floor muscles, also called vaginal muscles or love muscles.
Strong pelvic floor muscles mean increased pleasure in the bedroom. Yet sex is only part of the picture. There are also a number of general health reasons that should entice women to exercise these muscles and encourage fitness professionals to start talking about this topic with their female clients.
The Pelvic Floor Importance
A woman's pelvic floor consists of a large group of muscles that perform a number of important functions. They support the female reproductive organs, enhance sexual pleasure and aid in childbirth. Although these muscles can't be seen as easily as a bicep or hamstring, women can feel them working when they voluntarily stop the flow of urine midstream--which, by the way, isn't advisable.
These muscles work like any other muscle in the body. In other words, if you don't use it, you'll lose it. "Without regular resistance exercise, those muscles lose 80 percent of their strength by the time a woman turns 65," says Daniel S. Stein, M.D., medical director of the Foundation for Intimacy in Tampa, Florida, and a board-certified gynecologist.
According to Stein, deconditioning of the pelvic floor muscles begins as early as the late teens and progressively worsens. Almost all of his patients, even those in their twenties and women who haven't had children, have experienced significant weakening of these muscles. "The lack of resistance exercise causes vaginal muscle atrophy in all women, not just women who give birth. Of course, childbirth overstretching and subsequent lack of resistance exercise of these internal muscles makes matters worse and the need for post-partum resistance exercise, to restore tone and tightness, even more important," explains Stein.
When vaginal muscle atrophy occurs, problems arise. According to the National Institutes of Health, perhaps the most common problem is urinary incontinence, which strikes at least 40 million people in this country (mainly women and the elderly). Urinary incontinence (a preventable but embarrassing leakage) is often provoked by a sudden movement like a cough, sneeze, laugh or jump.
Furthermore, weak pelvic floor muscles can't properly support women's reproductive organs. Over time, these organs drop lower in the body, causing lower back discomfort and pain, especially during intercourse. This weakening also decreases women's stimulation during intercourse. Moreover, without strength, vaginal muscles in women who have just given birth won't recover as quickly as they would if they were strong.
"All of these problems can be prevented," says Suzanne Sloan, president of Naissance Holdings L.C., manufacturer of GyneFlex[TM]. "You have to start by being fit internally," Sloan adds.
The Kegel Controversy
Until recently, women have been encouraged to do Kegel exercises to strengthen their vaginal muscles. These squeeze-and-hold exercises were pioneered by Dr. Arnold Kegel in the 1940s. He discovered that vaginal muscles could be isolated and strengthened through resistance exercise.
In modern-day Kegels, women are instructed to squeeze their pelvic floor muscles (as if stopping the flow of urine), hold for an amount of time (varies from doctor to doctor) and then release. Yet Dr. Kegel never intended his exercises to be done without resistance, which is why modern-day Kegels have proven useless.
"A muscle must perform work to build strength and endurance and today's Kegels don't promote muscle development," Stein says. Doing Kegels, he adds, is like doing arm curls without a dumbbell. Furthermore, women often do Kegels incorrectly. They either can't execute the exercise because their vaginal muscles are too weak or they contract the wrong muscles, usually their abdominals and thighs. Childbearing women also undergo episiotomies to tighten the outer tissue of the vagina, but Stein says this does not restore muscle tone. For these reasons he recommends that women of all ages begin a resistance program for their pelvic floor muscles. While there are numerous contraptions on the market, Stein advocates his creation, GyneFlex[TM].
Introducing GyneFlex[TM]
According to Stein, GyneFlex[TM] functions like a pair of dumbbells for the pelvic floor muscles. Simply put, women work against the resistance of the GyneFlex[TM] to increase their vaginal strength. The small, penis-shaped device comes in varying resistances so women can continually challenge their muscles.
Unless they're severely deconditioned, most women start with the standard set which includes two GyneFlex[TM] devices, equivalent to four and six-pound weights. There's also a set for severely deconditioned women which offers the lightest resistance. Once they gain strength, women can move to the next set.
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