Pelvic Floor Ultrasound

Hello, my name is Dr Brent Anderson President, founder of Pollstar plots, and we're here at the PMA conference in Fort Lauderdale and we're taking advantage of all these wonderful Pilatos around and we're measuring the activity of the pelvic floor. And what we're looking at with the ultrasound is to see if when a pilates teacher think he or she is lifting their pelvic floor, that they're actually lifting it and not pushing it down. Well surprise, surprise, surprise, 50% of the plot is teachers are actually pushing the pelvic floor down. So one of the things we think is happening is that plot, these teachers are not understanding the basic physiological concept that they do have all the other muscles of the abdominal muscles in the pelvic floor. For example, a muscle needs to be able to contract and relax. If we walk around all the time holding the muscle contract, you will end up with what's called a contracture.

So we think the potties teachers are over recruiting their abdominal wall and lifting up pelvic floor all the time and now they're not able actually to relax it. So what I want to do here is, um, my, my colleague Kim and I are looking actually at a video image of the pelvic floor utilizing the realtime ultrasound. And as I ask him to gently lift the pelvic floor up, we should actually see the pelvic floor lift just like that. On the screen here, what we're actually looking at is this curve here is actually the ultrasound head looking through the abdominal wall. And this is the bladder which gives us the darkness. And that's how we know that the baseline here is the pelvic floor. So when I ask him to lift the pelvic floor, we should see this line lift up and then relax and see a drop back down and lift and down. Now what we're seeing here, actually in, in a number of the plotters teachers is they think they're lifting it up, but they're actually going to Kim and push it down, pushing it down.

The pushing down typically is coming from an over recruitment push down. Again, you can see the muscles coming in and pushing the bladder down in the pelvic floor down. So this doctor Brent Anderson at Pollstar PyLadies asking you to relax your pelvic floor and relax your abdominal wall, taken deep breath, do some squats, and make sure that you have a nice healthy pelvic floor by paying less attention to it at times, rather than too much attention to it.