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.
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Appearances
And so I think all of those things have really just, yeah, been able to help me connect with so many people over the years and provide them help and resources for these really kind of intimate and often embarrassing issues.
So I went into college. I went to Washington University in St. Louis in the Midwest. I was born and raised in New Orleans. And the first time I ever flew on a plane, I was 17 and going to college. Like, I mean, I was kind of a small town girl. And so even being from New Orleans and I went to WashU knowing that I wanted to be a physical therapist. I said, I don't want to be a doctor.
I don't want to be in school forever. I don't want to be a nurse, but I'm active. I run track. I swim. I don't want to sit behind a desk all day, and I want to work with people. And just kind of following those small things I knew about myself led me into this field. And so I was at WashU for seven years, undergraduate and graduate school.
I got a degree in psychology, and then I went on to get a doctorate in physical therapy. And while I was in physical therapy school, I had a professor who's still my mentor to this day, 18 years later, who gave us this two-week lecture on women's health.
Now it's called pelvic health, but it was just talking about how a woman's body changes and how muscles influence that, like everything from giving birth to exercise, but also just sex and peeing and pooping and periods. And I was like, I've never heard of muscles controlling those things, but it made so much sense. And then I loved understanding my own body as a woman.
And then when I started kind of practicing in the field, even as a student, I said, I really love educating other women about their bodies. And I think for all of them, this light bulb would just go off of like, oh, this is just muscles. It's not like something super weird or scary or foreign. It's just muscles. And then to see them get better with just exercises and movement and
And physical therapy changed their lives. And I was like, this is exactly what I want to do. And so I started eight years ago in the field and I've bounced around to a couple of different cities and states, but it's all that I've ever done. And I still practice in a clinic today, seeing women and men.
I only do pelvic floor therapy. So the way that we assess the pelvic floor, and I think that this is really the mystical part of it is- Yeah. These muscles are kind of deep in your pelvis. So when you think about the bones that we all have, like you put your hands on your hips and you're on your hip bones, but that's really the top part of your pelvis.
You put your hands kind of in the lower front part, that's your pubic bone, and then you've got your tailbone in the back. At the bottom of that bowl of bones is a basket of muscles, and that's what we call your pelvic floor muscles. And those muscles support your pelvic organs. All bodies have them, men and women and kids, everyone.
So those muscles support your bladder, which hold urine, your balls, which hold stool. In the male, they hold the prostate. In the female, they hold the uterus and ovaries. These muscles support growing babies during pregnancy. They support your spine. They hold in pee and poop. They help with erections, ejaculation, orgasm, sexual activity, the passageway for menstruation. So
I mean, they're so important, yet we don't talk about them. And we also don't even know they exist until we start having a problem in this area. And so that's really the story behind Florida is I wanted people to understand their bodies. I focused more on women, all on women in the book. That's who I have more experience treating.
And they also just experience more pelvic floor problems than men because they have a vagina. So yeah, these muscles kind of influence all of those things. And that's what we help with in physical therapy.
Oh my gosh. Yes. So many men have pelvic floor issues like pain, sexual dysfunction. It could be anything from premature ejaculation, difficulty maintaining erections, painful orgasm to pooping problems, painful bowel movements, rectal pain, tailbone pain. I mean, so much.
Absolutely. So these are muscles like any other muscles in your body. They can get tight and tense, like we maybe get in our neck and shoulders, right? And that could be from posture, that could be from stress, could be from weightlifting, and whatever it is, the muscles respond in a way that causes tension, and maybe we get neck pain and headaches. The same thing can happen in your pelvic floor.
It could be sitting with your legs crossed. It could be clenching your butt because you're stressed out and nervous. It could be holding and pee and poop for too long. It could be trauma. For women specifically, there are three times in a woman's life that directly influence their pelvic floor and make them at a higher risk for pelvic floor issues.
And it's pregnancy, it's childbirth, and it's perimenopause and menopause. During pregnancy, the muscles, these pelvic floor muscles support a growing baby and they get stretched out and weaker during pregnancy. During birth, they can have a tear into the muscles. They're stretched out from pushing. You can have a C-section, which creates abdominal tension and scar restriction.
So all of those things influence the pelvic floor. And then...
perimenopause and menopause your hormones are changing you have lower estrogen lower testosterone decreased collagen so those muscles get weaker and thinner over time and this is why women have more issues than men typically when it pertains to weakness or pain because they go through these life stages that men don't got it okay cool i'm taking notes by the way okay sweet so
So typically, the way that the medical system works here in the US is that they go see a doctor. The doctor says, let me run all these tests and see if something's wrong. And then if they don't find anything, they send them to another doctor and send them to another doctor. By the time people reach pelvic floor therapy, sometimes they've gone through seven to eight physicians.
And they're like, all the tests are normal. The blood works normal. But we can't figure out why you are peeing all the time or you have pain with urination or whatever the case may be.
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