Your pelvic floor is a matter of timing

You sneeze, lift a full bag or laugh out loud, and something escapes. Or you feel a heaviness low down that wasn't there before.

Then you start avoiding things: jumping on a trampoline, running, lifting anything heavy. Sneezing and laughing can't be put off, so you learn to live around them. And something subtler slips away: lowering yourself onto a chair with control rather than plonking yourself down. For that, your pelvic floor has to lengthen without letting go.

The advice that follows is almost always the same. Pelvic floor exercises, often called Kegels: several times a day, tighten the muscles and relax them again, as if you were stopping a wee midstream.

Tightening trains one half of what your pelvic floor does. The other half is yielding in good time to the pressure that comes from above.

Four tasks, each with its own tension

Your pelvic floor carries the organs of the lower abdomen and lets through what needs to come out. It works with your diaphragm so that you can breathe deeply and steadily, and it helps keep your lower back and your posture stable. Each of these tasks asks for a different amount of tension, at a different moment.

Why tightening is only half of it

Your diaphragm and your transversus abdominis work in opposition. As you breathe in, the diaphragm contracts and the transversus makes room; as you breathe out, the diaphragm relaxes and the transversus contracts. The same principle is at work in your pelvic floor.

Yielding isn't the same as letting go. Letting go is what you do on the loo. Yielding means regulating your length, like a trampoline that gives beneath a jump and sends you back up. If your pelvic floor has enough tone, it gives downwards with the pressure of a sneeze or a cough and then returns. If the muscles are overstretched, you feel an urge to pee at that very moment.

Why the distinction is so hard to make

The muscles around it are bigger, and you use them all day long. Your buttocks, inner thighs and deep hip rotators take over the work before you notice. What's more, your nervous system can't properly control the pelvic floor until around the age of four. Anyone who had to be toilet-trained before then has probably learnt to use other muscles for the job. Childbirth or surgery may have damaged the muscles and the way they're controlled. The brain is plastic, though, so the pathway from your brain to your pelvic floor can still be adjusted.

Perineum and levator ani

The perineum lies just beneath the skin, between your sitting bones, pubic bone and tailbone. That's the layer you can touch. About four centimetres higher lies the levator ani, a deeper and firmer layer slung from the inner walls of the pelvis like a hammock. The two layers feel different and do different work. Knowing which of the two you're contracting is where coordination begins.

Perceiving it slowly

Your pelvic floor is addressed in every class, as part of your core. At a slow pace you can perceive from within when you lengthen there and when you shorten, and whether that happens at the right moment. The questions that arise: where the tone is too high and where too low, which muscles take over the work, what you were once taught to do with it, and how all this relates to the arches of your feet, your breath and the space around your throat.

This isn't a separate programme. Your pelvic floor comes up in the movements you're doing anyway, because that's where it does its work.

Taking it further

Would you like to explore this in your own body? You can, in Essential Pilates, in small groups at my studio in Maastricht. Getting to know each other is free.