Sara Reardon
speaker
284 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Sara Reardon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I'm a pelvic floor therapist, and I really try to stay in my lane. But I mean, if you, a lot of people are scared to exercise or they don't know what's safe or what's not if they leak or if they have prolapse or abdominal separation or diastasis recti. So I wanted people to have a resource of how do you do this at home? And it's 10, they're 10 minute workouts, 10 to 20.
So you don't need 45 minutes. I mean, if you're a busy mom, you don't have 45 minutes three times a week, right? You maybe have 10 minutes, but I'm like, everybody does have 10 minutes. Like you scroll for at least 10 minutes a day. So if you can carve that out a couple times a week and really start working on your pelvic floor, I mean, the benefits are huge.
And I've had women over the years that are like, I did this before my birth and I had the best birth experience. I had no tearing or... I've been leaking for years and I'm finally able to run again. Or, you know, my mom has prolapse and I don't want to end up like her in diapers. So like, thank you for giving me resources. And it's very affordable. It's like $21 a month at the cheapest level.
And that's important because not everyone can access, you know, in-person therapy or out of network, you know, private services. So I really want this to kind of become the normal for women's healthcare so that they can work on their pelvic floors and prevent issues.
Yeah. So prolapse is when your pelvic organs aren't supported well by that hammock of pelvic floor muscles. And so your bladder, your rectum, or your uterus kind of starts to drop down into the vagina. You might feel a bulge at the opening of your vagina or like something's like falling out.
And it sounds scary, but it's really an issue where your muscles are tense and you might be straining or they're weak and the muscles or the organs are kind of pushing through. And so by strengthening your muscles and working on relaxation, you can kind of actually relift those organs and give them more support.
But it's 50% of women who have given birth have some degree of prolapse walking around out there. And if you're lifting heavy weights and not breathing properly, you're engaging your pelvic floor. If you're straining with bomb movements or you're pushing when you pee, I mean, all of those things can contribute and make this issue much worse.
Right, so in the female body, your uterus, your ovaries, your bladder, and your bowels. And then you also have your balls are kind of connected to your colon, so any kind of digestive issue. For males, it's their bladder, their balls, which hold stool, and then their prostate. And men only have two openings.
Men only have two openings in the pelvic floor, one for the urethra through the penis, and then the anal opening. Females have three openings. They have the urethra, where urine exits, the anus, where poop exits, and then the vagina for vaginal birth, vaginal intercourse, menstruation. So, you know, females just have more susceptibility to weakness too because they have an extra hole.
But we see that's the difference between female and male bodies too.
Yes, I see this all of the time. I see it in teachers, medical professionals, people who don't like to use the bathroom in public, holding your bladder too long. So the normal frequency to pee is two to four hours. If you're going more frequently than that, you're going too frequently. It's like overactive bladder syndrome, which your pelvic floor is a component.
But if you're holding it longer than four hours, you can create hypertension in those muscles and then your bladder gets really full. And then when you try to pee, you can't relax. So then you try to push, you have to sit down, you strain, you have to push in your stomach to try to get your bladder to empty. You know, there's all of these things that it can...
totally lead to a pelvic floor issue. And it can even lead to a urinary tract infection because you're not emptying your bladder frequently enough. And then bacteria accumulates in the bladder and creates an infection. So I always tell people pee when you have the urge to pee, like don't overhold it. And I think people can go too frequently or too infrequently.
And both of those are pelvic floor problems.
Yeah. This is such a great question because these are muscles like any other muscle in your body. You can absolutely overtrain them. You know, I had a gentleman who years ago I was seeing him, he had urinary leakage after his prostate was removed. After you have prostate cancer, they can remove your prostate and it can lead to erectile dysfunction and urinary incontinence.
And he was doing 2000 Kegels a day. And when I went in to assess his muscles, he was, had so much pain and spasm in his pelvic floor. And he was like, I'm sitting in a truck and I'm a truck driver. So I'm just like doing Kegels all day. And I was like, but you don't need, just like, you don't need 2000 bicep curls, right? No. Like, what would you say?
You want to load, you want to work to fatigue, you want to gradually increase intensity, you can do heavier loads, you can do more reps, but like you do three sets of 10 max, right? And so it's about gradual strengthening, but you don't need more than 30. But the other thing is you have to bring this muscle into function.
So if you're at the gym and you're like, oh, I have pelvic floor weakness, right? Or I want to make sure I'm protecting my core and my pelvic floor. I would guide you to engage your pelvic floor. So pre-contract. A pelvic floor contraction is what we also call a Kegel. Do a pelvic floor contraction prior to lifting, prior to squatting, prior to lunging,
you know, contract these muscles before you load and then make sure that you're breathing. A really common thing that we see with a lot of heavyweight lifters and trainers is that they hold their breath when they're lifting heavy loads. And it's a compensatory technique and it's fine to lift heavy loads, but as a long-term strategy, it will blow out your pelvic floor.
I mean, you'll have hemorrhoids, you can have rectal prolapse, you can have a hernia, diastasis recti, because that air is getting trapped and it doesn't have a place to go. So it's going to find the path of least resistance. So in a male body, it might be an umbilical hernia or a hemorrhoid. But in a female body, we have vaginas and we have that extra layer kind of opening of weakness.
Showing 181–200 of 284 · page 10 of 15
← Previous
Next →