Your pelvic floor therapy often starts with education. You’ll learn about the pelvic diaphragm, surrounding organs, and where the pelvic muscles are located in your body, as well as what caused the dysfunction.
Your physiotherapist at TRi Physical Therapy helps you understand why certain actions — like clenching your buttocks or not relieving yourself when you need to go — can aggravate your condition and lead to incontinence. Visit a physiotherapist pelvic floor pt’s to prevent this from occurring.
Physiotherapy for your pelvic diaphragm muscles may include several treatments. Sometimes, your physiotherapist adds treatments that benefit your knees, shoulders, and back.
A pelvic floor rehabilitation program is an effective alternative to more invasive, surgical intervention in reducing the frequency of urinary leakage. Common pelvic floor physical therapy treatment modalities include:
- Pelvic floor muscle training. These strategic exercises train your pelvic muscles to respond appropriately. Along with breathing exercises, you learn how to contract and relax your pelvic muscles through repetition.
- Manual therapy. This is a one-on-one approach, incorporating massages and stretching exercises to boost your blood circulation, improve your posture and increase flexibility.
- Myofascial pelvic pain treatment. Often chronic, myofascial pelvic pain requires hands-on, pressure-release therapy to loosen up the muscles. Treatment may also involve dry needling for deep tissue therapy, a technique in which thin needles are inserted into your skin at specific points to help release muscle tension.
- Electrical stimulation. Done in appropriate places, this technique makes your muscles twitch, allowing the tightness to dissolve and loosen. This therapy is especially useful for those with weak muscles. You feel the effect from the very first session.
- Biofeedback. This modality involves devices to train women and men on how to exercise their muscles. Special sensors connect to a computer monitor to help your therapist understand where your pain is. Through feedback, the muscles and surrounding tissues are desensitized.
- Trigger point therapy. This treatment deals with finding your pain areas and applying stimulus — either through hands or devices — to make your muscles relax. You may feel relief from the first session.