7 Proven Ways to Release Pelvic Floor Tension
Part One: Is It Bad to Have a Tight Pelvic Floor? What Every Woman Needs to Know
Part Two: What Causes Tight Pelvic Floor Muscles? How Tension is Held in the Body
Part Three: Why Kegels Make Tight Pelvic Floor Muscles Worse (And the Gentle Practice That Will Actually Help)
Part Four: 7 Proven Ways to Release Pelvic Floor Tension
A variety of factors can cause pelvic floor muscle spasm (also known as a tight pelvic floor) from breathing patterns and posture to stress and unresolved injuries.
As a Doctor of Physical Therapy with over a decade and a half of experience helping women heal their pelvic floor, I'd love to share the exact strategies I use every day in my practice to help women relieve pressure, release tension, and restore true, lasting function.
These are the same foundational tools I teach inside The Core Recovery Method®, my online program that helps you stop chasing symptoms and start building a core system that supports you from the inside out. These proven strategies go far beyond Kegels, addressing the real root causes of pelvic floor dysfunction: tension, pressure, and nervous system imbalance.
In this blog, I’ll walk you through the 7 most effective techniques I use to treat pelvic floor muscle spasm—all rooted in your body’s original blueprint and innate ability to heal.
Here's what we’ll cover:
- Breath: how to use decompression breathing to reduce pressure and restore core coordination
- Releasing trigger point: why supporting muscles need to let go before your pelvic floor can
- Rhythm: how restoring reflexive movement leads to lasting stability and ease
- Posture: why alignment is everything, and how to sit, stand, and move for healing
- Bathroom habits: the surprising ways your routines may be reinforcing tension
- Nervous system regulation: the overlooked key to long-term pelvic floor relief
- Trusting your gut: how reconnecting with your body’s signals rebuilds deep trust
Whether you’re struggling with tightness, leaking, prolapse, or pressure, these 7 strategies will help you shift from frustration to clarity and from chronic tension to deep release.
Your Breath: The Most Powerful Tool You’re Not Using Yet
The way you breathe directly shapes the way your pelvic floor functions. Every inhale and exhale either builds tension or creates the space your body needs to release it.
Most women are stuck in a breathing pattern that places constant downward pressure on their pelvic floor. Belly breathing, for example, causes the diaphragm to move only downward, pressing your abdominal organs onto the very muscles that are already overworked. This pressure forces the pelvic floor to stay in a constant state of contraction just to keep up.
But your body was designed to work differently. When you breathe the way your body was meant to—by expanding your ribcage in all directions (sideways and front-to-back), not just pushing your belly out—your diaphragm regains its full functional strength again. It moves not just up and down, but also side to side, gently lifting your organs and inviting your pelvic floor to follow that natural rhythm: expanding, softening, releasing.
This kind of breath-led healing can begin right away. Many women feel a noticeable shift—less pressure, less tightness, less urgency—within just a few breaths of practicing the right technique. And with consistency, your 20,000 daily breaths become moments of healing, not strain. This is the foundation of The Core Recovery Method®, a protocol that teaches your breath to lead, so your body can follow.
Release Surrounding Tension: Relaxing Your Pelvic Floor Starts Beyond the Pelvic Floor
Your pelvic floor doesn’t operate alone. It’s part of an integrated system, deeply connected to the muscles and fascia of your hips, glutes, and lower back.
When those areas are tight, underactive, or filled with trigger points, they stop supporting your core the way they’re meant to. And when your pelvic floor is left unsupported—working with injured or incompetent teammates—she does what women do best: she compensates. She grips. She braces. She holds everything together.
Think of your body as an interconnected web. Tension in one area pulls on the entire system, creating patterns of strain and compensation that ripple throughout. Long hours of sitting can tighten your hip flexors, shut down your glutes, and overload your pelvic floor with trigger points and pressure. Stiffness in your spine, hips, or SI joint only adds to the demand, leaving your pelvic floor to carry more than she was ever meant to handle.
This is why true pelvic floor healing doesn’t begin with more effort; it begins with release. When you release trigger points, stretch tight fascia, restore mobility in your hips and spine, and reactivate your glutes, you take the burden off your pelvic floor.
And when that burden lifts, even a little, your body knows what to do, and your pelvic floor automatically comes back online again. Many women describe it as feeling lighter, more connected, and finally at home in their body again. Because this work isn’t just about muscle function. It’s about trust. And release is the first step.
Inside The Core Recovery Method®, you’ll learn how to unwind these patterns and create a pelvic environment where ease, not tension, becomes your new normal.
Reflexive Activation: Restore the Original Rhythms
Your pelvic floor was never meant to be micromanaged. You shouldn’t have to constantly think about squeezing or relaxing it. Just like your digestion, heartbeat, and circulation, pelvic floor function is meant to happen automatically, without conscious control.
In a healthy, supported body, your breath is what drives this reflexive activation. With every inhale and exhale, your pelvic floor moves in rhythm with your diaphragm, lifting and releasing in a natural flow. No clenching. No forcing. Just the effortless, behind-the-scenes coordination your body was born with.
This rhythmic motion is part of a larger system that governs circulation, digestion, and lymphatic flow. When your breath moves freely, your pelvic floor follows suit—rising, falling, and adapting to changes in pressure with grace and ease.
But when you’ve experienced trauma, injury, poor posture, pregnancy, or prolonged stress, this natural rhythm gets disrupted. The coordination between your diaphragm and pelvic floor breaks down. Your breath becomes shallow. Your core stops responding automatically. And your pelvic floor does her best to compensate and starts holding on for dear life.
The result? Tension, pressure, pain, and dysfunction that no amount of conscious squeezing can fix.
Restoring reflexive movement is one of the most powerful steps you can take in your pelvic floor healing journey. It’s not about doing more—it’s about creating the conditions for your body to remember her original blueprint. That’s exactly what we do inside The Core Recovery Method®.
Through breath-led techniques that awaken your body’s built-in core reflexes, you reconnect the communication between your diaphragm, pelvic floor, and deep abdominal muscles. This rewiring happens deep within your nervous system, where 80% of pelvic floor function actually lives.
When this system comes back online, you stop thinking about your pelvic floor altogether because she’s finally doing her job again. Effortlessly. Just like she was always meant to. Because your body isn’t broken. She’s just been waiting for the right kind of support to help her remember.
Posture: Align Your Spine, Support Your Core
How you sit, stand, and move throughout your day either supports your healing or silently works against it.
Posture isn’t just about how you look. It’s about how your entire core system functions under the forces of gravity, breathing, and pressure. When your spine and pelvis are aligned well, your pelvic floor can maintain her natural tone without gripping or strain. When your ribcage stacks properly over your pelvis, your diaphragm can move freely, your organs are supported, and your pelvic floor responds reflexively to every breath.
The problem? Most of us have adopted postures that feel “normal” but are anything but functional. Tucked pelvises. Collapsed ribs. Locked knees. These subtle misalignments force your pelvic floor into protective overdrive—tightening, bracing, and working far harder than she should.
But posture correction doesn’t mean rigid or robotic. It’s about dynamic alignment through positions that feel alive, supportive, and adaptable to your real life. Even small shifts in how you sit at your desk, carry your toddler, or walk through the grocery store can make a profound difference in your pelvic floor symptoms.
When your whole system is aligned well, your pelvic floor doesn’t have to overwork. She can soften. She can trust.
Inside The Core Recovery Method®, I teach you how to gently restore these postural foundations in everyday movement without needing to “fix” yourself all day long. It's not about perfect posture, but functional posture that supports your healing while you live your life.
“The Core Recovery Method® online program has been awesome! I have seen major improvements in my pelvic pain, bloating and back pain. It’s been such a perfect fit for me. Often with any core exercises I’m worried I’ll be making my core more tense and not strong, but this program has put my mind at ease. I’ll keep going with this forever! Nothing has worked like this before.”
-Rebecca W.
Bathroom Habits: A Hidden Link to Pelvic Floor Dysfunction
You might be surprised to learn that the way you use the bathroom could be training their pelvic floor to stay tight.
But your daily toilet hygiene routines—like how you sit, how you breathe, and when you go—play a huge role in either reinforcing dysfunction or supporting healing. When you push to pee or poop, go “just in case” before every errand, or hover over the toilet, you're unintentionally teaching your pelvic floor to brace when it should be letting go.
Over time, this creates a pattern of guarded tension, urgency, and incomplete emptying, all of which are key contributors to prolapse, leaking, and discomfort.
Bathroom hygiene retraining is one of the most overlooked but powerful tools in pelvic floor recovery. It’s about learning how to:
- Relax fully during urination and bowel movements (no more hovering or pushing)
- Position your body, and organs to support reflexive pelvic floor release and complete elimination
- Retrain your bladder’s signaling system so it communicates clearly and calmly, not constantly
These small, daily changes allow your pelvic floor to move through its full range of motion, which is essential for keeping the muscles strong, supple, and responsive. This is one of the fastest ways women inside The Core Recovery Method® begin to feel relief, without adding more reps or routines to their already full lives. Because healing doesn’t always require doing more. Sometimes it starts with doing less, and doing it differently.
Nervous System Regulation: First comes Safety, then comes Healing
What if your pelvic floor isn’t tight because it’s broken, but because it’s protecting you?
The truth is, most of your pelvic floor function is governed by your autonomic nervous system—the part of your brain that controls unconscious functions like digestion, breathing, and yes, pelvic floor tone.
That means your symptoms may not just be physical... they may be your body’s way of saying, “I don’t feel safe letting go yet.”
Chronic stress, trauma (even old, subtle ones), and overwhelm can all signal your nervous system to brace and guard. And that protective tension often settles into the pelvic floor, locking muscles into a state of “on,” even when the threat is long gone.
The solution isn’t to push through. Instead, you need to retrain the system that’s doing the bracing. In The Core Recovery Method®, we do exactly that by:
- Using breath to co-regulate your diaphragm and pelvic floor
- Teaching you how to tune into your body with curiosity, not control
- Incorporating gentle movement that tells your brain: “I’m safe now”
This approach creates the conditions your body has been waiting for—the ones that tell your nervous system it can finally release the grip. Because when your body feels safe, she doesn’t need to hold on anymore. She can soften. She can respond. And she can heal.
Trusting Your Gut
The most powerful healing happens when you stop forcing and start listening. Your body was never meant to be micromanaged. She was designed to self-regulate, to adapt, and to heal.
When pelvic floor dysfunction lingers, it’s often because your nervous system is still trying to protect you. But protection isn’t the same as healing. To shift out of protection mode, your body needs safety, softness, and space.
Inside The Core Recovery Method®, you learn how to tune into your body’s subtle signals and follow them, not override them. This internal point of focus becomes a powerful guide. You’ll learn to notice:
- When your muscles are gripping or guarding
- What movements or postures feel safe and supportive
- How to follow the cues of your breath and nervous system to guide your healing
This is nervous system regulation at its deepest level. You're not just calming the system, but reconnecting with the felt sense of trust in your body. You don’t need to force your way to healing. You just need to create the conditions where your body feels safe enough to remember what it already knows. And when she feels safe… healing happens fast. Symptoms that lingered for years often begin to shift within days.
Ready to Heal Your Pelvic Floor Without More Kegels or Confusion?
The Core Recovery Method® is a breath-led approach to restoring pelvic floor balance, posture, and whole-body stability through nervous system regulation and mindful movement. It’s evidence-informed, body-honoring, and designed to help you release tension and rebuild strength from the inside out — at home, and at your own pace.
