If you've been focusing on strengthening your core, stretching your hip flexors, or foam rolling your glutes but still feel like something’s off—your hips might be throwing your pelvic floor into dysfunction. That’s right, weak or uncoordinated hip mechanics can set off a chain reaction (pun intended) that leaves your pelvic floor overworked, tight, and eventually dysfunctional.
How Hip Function Impacts the Pelvic Floor
Your hips and pelvic floor don’t work as a team. They’re part of a closed-chain kinetic system, meaning that the way force transfers through your legs, pelvis, and core determines how well you move—and how well your pelvic floor holds up over time. If your hips aren’t providing the stability and strength they should, your pelvic floor may step in as a compensatory stabilizer, leading to tension, dysfunction, and pain.
Here’s how that plays out:
Weak Hips, Overactive Pelvic Floor: When the glutes and deep hip rotators don’t do their job, the pelvic floor takes on extra work to maintain pelvic and spinal stability. Over time, this leads to tightness and a lack of functional coordination in the pelvic floor muscles.
Faulty Force Transfer in Closed-Chain Movements: Every time you squat, run, or lunge, your hips should absorb and distribute force efficiently. If they don’t, the strain moves elsewhere—often straight to the pelvic floor. This can create excessive pressure, leading to symptoms like pelvic pain, urinary leakage, or balance loss during movement.
Hip Imbalances and Altered Pelvic Alignment: Poor hip stability can cause subtle shifts in pelvic positioning, leading to excessive anterior or posterior tilt as well as SI joint derangement. These postural imbalances can overstretch or compress the pelvic floor muscles, disrupting their normal function and contributing to chronic issues.
Impact on Breathing Mechanics: Your diaphragm, core, and pelvic floor work together as a pressure management system. When hip function is compromised, breathing patterns can change, creating excess intra-abdominal pressure that stresses all the structures involved over time.
Symptoms That Suggest Your Hips Are Contributing to Pelvic Floor Dysfunction
If you’re experiencing any of these symptoms, your hip mechanics might be to blame:
Pelvic pain or tightness that worsens with activity
Urinary leakage, especially during running, jumping, or lifting
Feeling like you can’t fully engage your core or glutes
Discomfort with prolonged standing, walking, or sitting
A sensation of heaviness or pressure in the pelvic region
Lower back pain that doesn’t improve with traditional core exercises
Why Traditional Pelvic Floor Exercises May Not Be Enough
If weak hips are the root cause of your pelvic floor dysfunction, simply doing Kegels or core work isn’t going to fix the problem. In fact, without addressing underlying movement patterns and structural alignment, pelvic floor exercises can reinforce dysfunction rather than resolve it.
What You Can Do to Fix It
If your hips are contributing to pelvic floor dysfunction, the solution lies in optimizing movement mechanics and improving closed-chain strength. Here’s where to start:
Strengthen Your Hips Strategically: Focus on exercises that integrate hip stability with core and pelvic floor function—like single-leg work, resisted lateral movements, and controlled deep squats.
Refine Your Movement Patterns: Work with a specialist to analyze and retrain your squat, lunge, and gait mechanics to ensure proper force distribution.
Incorporate Functional Breathing: Coordinate diaphragmatic breathing with movement to manage intra-abdominal pressure and reduce excessive strain on the pelvic floor.
Improve Pelvic Positioning: If poor hip stability has altered your pelvic alignment, corrective exercises can help restore a more neutral posture and relieve unnecessary tension on the pelvic floor.
Work with a Certified Pelvic Health Specialist: A certified pelvic floor physical therapist can assess how your hips, core, and pelvic floor are interacting and create a treatment plan that targets the true source of dysfunction.
Taking a Holistic Approach
Your hips and pelvic floor are part of the same system—when one isn’t functioning well, the other pays the price. By addressing hip weakness and faulty movement mechanics, you can take the strain off your pelvic floor and set yourself up for better stability, strength, and pain-free movement.
Up Next: How to Find the Root Cause and Keep It Fixed
In our final installment, we’ll dive into how treatment at Pelvic Health Solutions can help you pinpoint the exact cause of your symptoms and provide lasting treatment strategies to keep you moving pain-free. Stay tuned!
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