How Pelvic Health Impacts Your Strength & Confidence
- Seema Chopra
- Jan 27
- 4 min read
Pelvic health affects more women than most people realise. It affects beginners. It affects athletes. It affects women who have had children and women who have not. Yet it often stays unspoken until it becomes unavoidable.
Sometimes it shows up as leaking during skipping, running, or heavy lifts. Sometimes it is pain, pressure, heaviness, or prolapse symptoms. Sometimes it is a quiet sense that something is not working properly and you do not know how to name it.
And because it sits in an area of the body that women have been taught to hide, it easily becomes shame.
What I want to name clearly is this. Pelvic health issues are not just physical issues. They often become identity issues. They reshape how a woman moves through the world.
The moment your body stops feeling reliable, everything narrows.
The Implicit Problem
There are two common coping strategies I see.
One is to laugh it off and push through.
The other is to stop doing anything that might trigger symptoms.
Both strategies make sense in the short term. Neither is particularly supportive long term.
The push through approach can reinforce dysfunction by repeatedly exposing the system to pressure without addressing coordination, breath, or load management. It often keeps women locked in bracing patterns, and bracing is not strength. It is protection.
The avoidance approach often protects confidence in the moment but slowly shrinks a woman’s movement world. She stops jumping. Stops running. Stops lifting. Stops training. Sometimes she stops being around other people in fitness spaces. Her community goes. Her self trust goes.
What begins as a symptom becomes a story.
My body is failing.
This is just what happens after babies.
I am too old for that now.
I have to accept it.
This is where pelvic health starts to affect mental wellbeing.
A Pillar Reframe Through RECOVER DEEPLY
Recovery is completion, not collapse.
Pelvic health is often framed as a strength issue, but it is more accurate to call it a pressure management and regulation issue. The pelvic floor is not a single muscle you squeeze. It is part of an integrated system that includes breath, diaphragm, abdominals, posture, nervous system state, and load tolerance.
It responds to safety.
When stress is high, breath becomes shallow. When breath is shallow, pressure moves differently through the trunk. When pressure is unmanaged, the pelvic floor either gets overloaded or stays switched on, attempting to hold everything together.
This is why some women have pelvic floor issues that are not about weakness. They are about tension, guarding, and fatigue.
The system is doing its best to protect you.
But protection is not the same as function.
What Pelvic Health Is, Simply
Pelvic health refers to the function of the muscles, connective tissue, and nerves within the pelvic bowl, roughly from pubic bone to coccyx, sit bone to sit bone. It supports continence, sexual function, posture, and load transfer.
Symptoms of pelvic health dysfunction can include:
urinary incontinence, bowel or wind incontinence
pelvic organ prolapse symptoms such as heaviness or bulging
pelvic pain, including pain during sex
difficulty emptying bladder or bowels
feelings of instability or disconnection in the pelvic region
You do not have to have given birth to experience this.
And you do not have to accept it as normal.
The Hidden Link With Stress and Anxiety
Pelvic health is deeply influenced by stress because stress changes breathing, muscle tone, and nervous system state.
An anxious body often lives in a subtly held posture. Shoulders up, breath high, abdomen rigid, pelvic floor gripping. This can happen without conscious effort. Over time, tension becomes baseline. And a pelvic floor that never fully relaxes is a pelvic floor that becomes reactive under load.
The irony is that many women train for mental health, but if the training approach increases pressure and bracing without connection, it can amplify symptoms, which then worsens anxiety and lowers confidence. This feedback loop is one reason pelvic health struggles can feel so consuming.
An Embodied Coaching Insight
The first shift is not a new exercise. It is a new relationship.
Many women are disconnected from this part of the body. Not because they are careless, but because they have been taught that this area is either private, shameful, or irrelevant unless something goes wrong.
When you place a hand on the lower abdomen, many women cannot feel breath there. It feels like a no man’s land. This matters because it is difficult to create strength in an area you cannot sense.
Connection is a form of recovery.
Breath that moves lower is not a relaxation technique. It is a pressure strategy. It gives the system a pathway. It changes how load is distributed. It can shift the entire experience of training from bracing to coordination.
This is where strength becomes transformative. Not because you push harder, but because you stop leaking power.
What Supports Change Most Often
The most common foundations that support pelvic health are not glamorous, but they are powerful:
stress load reduction, even in small increments
improved sleep, because healing happens outside the gym
hydration, because tissues need water, and restriction often worsens symptoms
toileting habits, because chronic holding and chronic “just in case” patterns both distort signals
breath and coordination work, because pressure has to go somewhere
training modifications based on your body, not a generic rulebook
Women often want a strict list of what they can and cannot do. Real support is more nuanced. It is a process of rebuilding trust and finding what is worth it, risk versus reward, and what changes allow the body to meet the demand safely.
When your body feels safe, strength comes back.
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