Tight Pelvic Floor?

Often, a tight pelvic floor is a painful pelvic floor.

If the pelvic floor muscles are tight/overactive and lacking range of motion, it can come from many different things. Let’s talk about it!

Sometimes pelvic pain can be a response to trauma. I’m talking physical, old or new, religious, emotional- anything.  

Sometimes pelvic pain can be a learned response to pain. This often happens when someone had an infection. There’s a guarding response that can occur with infections, for example a UTI, in which the pelvic muscle get tight as a response to the infection. This becomes a cycle of pain.

Sometimes pelvic pain is due to an injury causing compensations while you perform some sort of activity (i.e. walking, standing, running, lifting). An example of this could be that you have a hip injury which results in decreased hip stabilizer strength. Due to this, the pelvic floor muscles get tight, to provide the stability that the hip muscles aren’t proving. I’ve also seen it due to a leg length discrepancy or scoliosis.

Along with that, it could be due to general and unprompted weakness in the surrounding musculature.

Most often, it’s a combination of many of these.

When I say I’m a pelvic floor physical therapist, often people think about urinary leakage and kegels. I could talk about those things until my face goes blue, and that IS a part of pelvic therapy, but my favorite thing to treat is pelvic pain with intimacy. Questions? Reach out!