Hi, I am Dr. Alicia Jeffrey-Thomas, and I'm a pelvic floor physical therapist. I'm here to answer questions submitted by the plusOne community.

So what is the proper way to do a kegel and what can help me do them better?

So the pelvic floor's main jobs are to hold up your internal organs and open and close for bowel and bladder functions. We can think about those two cues when we're thinking about how to activate the pelvic floor muscles.

We want to close off the openings and then contract upward to help to support those internal organs.

So my favorite cue is to imagine that you have a blueberry sitting in your underwear and you're trying to use your pelvic floor muscles to grab around that blueberry and pull it up and inside you. But you want to make sure that you're keeping it isolated just to those pelvic floor muscles.

So you don't wanna see your abs coming into play or your glutes or your inner thighs. Ideally, if you're sitting here in a chair, you should be able to contract your pelvic floor, and nobody should have any idea that you're doing anything. If you're bouncing up and down, we're gonna know that you're contracting something else.

And one more thing, make sure you're not holding your breath. Ideally, you should be able to do this pelvic floor contraction on an exhale.

You can try a couple of different versions of this contraction. Maybe somewhere you're holding for five to 10 seconds and then resting in between, and somewhere you're doing quicker contractions, where you're trying to go up and down through that full range of motion.

You also have the ability to kind of enhance that contraction by using something like a kegel trainer, which gives you kind of that real time feedback to the quality of your contraction, as well as just a proprioceptive tool of being able to actually squeeze around something to get that squeeze and lift component

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