“I believe there is great power in storytelling to heal shame, fear, anger or embarrassment around our pelvic spaces”
— Dr. Casie Danenhauer Humble
Home Exercise Program: Pelvic Mobility and Pelvic Clocks
Today’s post is one of my very favorite basic sequences for facilitating pelvic floor awareness and pelvic mobility. These motions may seem simple, but are often not easy! The cues for connection to the breath with fine tuned pelvic movement combined with pelvic floor dropping (relaxation) and activation often challenge patients. This is as much as a coordination exercise as it is therapeutic mobility and gentle core activation. You can use these exercises for strengthening the transverse abdominus and pelvic floor with extra attention on the exhales or you can use these movements to facilitate more sensory awareness by just noticing and breathing and feeling what the movement feels like in your body. Enjoy whichever way you choose to approach this exercise and as always… if you’re not sure this is for you check in with your doc or pelvic floor PT.
Embracing the Cold in the Name of Self-Care
Self-care can look a lot of ways and given that it’s a HUGE component of what I preach to my patients, I’m always looking for new ways to practice it. November was a month of embracing the cold in an effort to heal my heart, improve my health, and go deeper into connection with my intuition... you know... so I can consistently become a better human and physical therapist. A few Saturdays ago I dove (well gracefully stepped into) the cold when a patient asked me to join him for a workshop hosted by Wim Hof, aka the Iceman. The Wim Hof Method uses a combination of breath-work, cold-exposure, and mindset training in an effort to maximize health, happiness, and connection with Presence and Love. My patient asked me to join him because he has had years of chronic pain management in traditional settings and is now starting to embrace that there’s a lot more to feeling well than what we might have been told by western medicine.
What Does A Pelvic Floor Physical Therapy Visit Look Like?
Welcome to my first video blog! This post was inspired by my previous blog posted in February 2017 about the sexual abuse cases involving Dr. Larry Nassar and and what is now known to be over a 150 young female athletes. In light of the recent sentencing of Nassar I have been contacted by multiple organizations and individuals asking me for clarification about what pelvic floor PT actually is. After responding to several of these inquiries it dawned on me that this information will be useful for me to share in a broader format for a wider audience... so here’s my response discussing the standards of care in PT and what a pelvic floor PT visit should look at and entail.