Pelvic floor and electrostimulation
Pelvic floor
The pelvic floor or perineum is a set of muscles that support the lower abdominal portion and support the bladder, uterus, and colon. It is essential that this structure maintains its function, otherwise it can cause urinary incontinence, cyst and rectocele, genital prolapse (*) and / or sexual dysfunctions.
Anatomically the pelvic floor is related to different organs:
- Anterior compartment: bladder and urethra
- Middle compartment: uterus and vagina, in women; prostate and seminal vesicles, in men.
- Posterior compartment: rectum and anal canal
Pelvic floor injury and / or weakness can be caused by various factors:
- Pregnancy
- Birth
- Lack of estrogens: postmenopause
- Surgical interventions
- Obesity
- Constipation
- Chronic cough: smoking
- Risk professions: athletes
- Ignorance of the perineum
The main muscles of the pelvic floor are arranged like a pelvic diaphragm, made up of:
- Levator ani muscle: composed of three bundles, puborectalis, pubococcygeus and iliococcygeus
- Coccygeal muscle
Said muscles are made up of both slow (type I) and fast (type II) fibers. The former are responsible for muscle tone and we would work on them by performing smooth and sustained contractions, while the latter are at the level of the periurethral striated sphincter and their function is to close the urethra during increases in abdominal pressure, to work the latter we would perform strong contractions and fast.
There are three fundamental requirements that must be met, to begin to strengthen these muscles:
- Be aware of the perineum
- Isolate the muscle groups that we want to strengthen
- Motivation
We will also have to take into account many other factors:
- Good perception of your body scheme, you have to be aware at all times of the muscles that you are activating in each exercise, there must always be voluntariness, the contraction is performed by us and we have full control over our body, the stimulus is a complement.
- Perfect knowledge of your abdominal and pelvic muscles
- Previous experience, since it has to be to know how to contract autonomously and voluntarily in addition to the pelvic floor itself, transverse abdomen, obliques and rectus abdominis.
- Prior to any type of abdominal contraction, the pelvic floor must be activated to avoid an increase in intra-abdominal and therefore intravaginal pressure, avoiding the inversion of the pelvic diaphragm and consequently its weakness.
- The pelvic floor will only be worked in the case of hypotonia. In the case of having an excess of tone, it would be counterproductive, since we would be promoting that hypertonia even more.
- If there is any previous pathology or injury to the pelvic floor, under no circumstances will we do this type of work, we will be favoring this dysfunction.
In addition to everything mentioned above, we have two handicaps when it comes to using EEIA, and they are the following:
- To perform an effective work on the muscles, the rest time must be at least equal to the work time, so in 20 minutes it would be difficult to accumulate enough volume to achieve adaptations.
- In order to be aware of our pelvic floor, we would have to work throughout the session with very low intensities, we could not take advantage of the EEIA as opposed to conventional training.
For all that we have mentioned, we decided that analytically working the pelvic floor with EEIA (fast) would not provide greater benefits than conventional training, however, working globally with the tonic program, you would exercise like the rest muscles of the body and we will strengthen the perineal area, helping to prevent problems such as urinary incontinence or prolapse, even helping to improve the sexual life of our clients.
We conclude that such an analytical and specific work must be carried out by a specialist, anyone who needs a rehabilitation of this area should not train with fast, unless the dysfunction remits completely, even so we will only carry out the training under medical prescription . We will only train people whose mere objective is to strengthen and improve this area of the body as a complement to a global training.
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