Why Kegels Make a Tight Pelvic Floor Worse
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 a Tight Pelvic Floor Worse
Part Four: 7 Proven Ways to Release Pelvic Floor Tension
If you've been faithfully doing your Kegels but your pelvic floor symptoms are getting worse and not better, you are not alone. So many women come to me after months, even years, of squeezing and lifting, only to find themselves still leaking during workouts, rushing to bathrooms, and living in bodies that feel unstable, weak, and disconnected. Some even notice their abdominal separation deepening or their waistline expanding, despite their commitment to strengthening their core.
The truth is, most women are told to do more—more reps, more bracing, more control—when what their body actually needs is the exact opposite. When your pelvic floor is already holding too much, adding more tension through Kegels can silently make your symptoms worse.
These muscles don’t need to work harder. They need to remember how to let go.
What Kegels Actually Do to Your Pelvic Floor
Kegels are often taught as the go-to exercise for pelvic floor issues, encouraging women to squeeze and lift in an effort to “strengthen” weak muscles. While the intention might make sense, the practice often misses the mark when it comes to how the pelvic floor is truly designed to function.
The problem? Most pelvic floor dysfunction isn’t caused by weakness, it’s caused by tension.
In fact, the vast majority of women I work with have pelvic floors that are already overactive, tight, and stuck in a constant state of contraction. When you add kegels to the mix, you’re layering more tension onto a system that’s already doing too much.
Imagine a stress ball that’s already squeezed tight. Contracting it even more doesn’t build strength, it builds strain. The same thing happens to your pelvic floor.
And it’s not just about tension. Healthy pelvic floor function depends on rhythm. Your muscles need to both contract and release. Relaxation is just as important as strength. Without the ability to fully let go, your pelvic floor can’t support your organs, regulate pressure, support your spine or coordinate with your breath in the way it’s meant to.
This is where kegels fall short: they emphasize effort, not safety. And for muscles already in protection mode, that effort often leads to more discomfort, more urgency, and more disconnection.
Your pelvic floor doesn’t need more squeezing. It needs space. It needs safety. It needs a new message.
Kegels Only Target 20% of Your Pelvic Floor
Here’s something most women are never told: only 20% of your pelvic floor is made up of muscles you can consciously control. That means when you’re doing kegels, you’re only engaging a small fraction of the system that responds to voluntary squeezing.
The other 80%? It’s made up of involuntary muscle fibers that you can’t consciously contract, but that are responsible for the functions that matter most in your everyday life:
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Keeping you dry when you laugh, sneeze, or jump
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Supporting your organs without effort or awareness
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Activating automatically when you lift, move, or breathe
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Maintaining stability and core rhythm throughout your day
When you rely on kegels alone, you’re training just a sliver of your pelvic floor while ignoring the deeper, more automatic systems that do the real heavy lifting. This is one of the biggest reasons women continue to experience leaking, pressure, or pain, even after faithfully doing their exercises.
You don’t need more control. You need more connection to the 80% of your pelvic floor that’s already wired to support you… when it’s given the chance to move, breathe, and let go.
Your Pelvic Floor Never Works in Isolation
Your pelvic floor is not meant to work alone. It’s part of a beautifully interconnected system that includes your diaphragm, deep core muscles, and spinal stabilizers. It's a system that’s designed to move in harmony with every breath you take.
In a healthy body, this deep core system responds automatically. When you laugh, lift a child, go up stairs, or even just inhale deeply, your diaphragm, pelvic floor, and core are meant to rise and fall together, stabilizing your spine, supporting your organs, and regulating pressure without you having to think about it.
Kegels interrupt this natural rhythm. By isolating the pelvic floor and forcing conscious contraction, they pull the system out of sync. Instead of training your body to work as a unified whole, Kegels reinforce artificial tension that doesn’t carry over into real-life movement.
In daily life, your pelvic floor never contracts on its own. It’s not meant to.
Healing comes not from forcing more effort into one part of the system, but from restoring coordination, timing, and trust between all the pieces.
That’s the key to lasting core stability: not isolation, but integration.
“The program has been absolutely amazing, whilst I’ve also been modifying other lifestyle habits I firmly believe The Core Recovery Method® has been integral in my healing. Life changing even. I’ve seen huge improvements in my digestion, my abdomen just feels better - softer, spacious, and also defined. My diaphragm feels free! I feel stronger in my yoga practice. I haven’t had sciatic pain in months which I used to get regularly mid luteal phase. I literally tell anyone who will listen about your program and have shared it with any student who complains of back pain and core weaknesses. Honestly I spent all of my life just thinking my stomach and bloating was just normal for me and trying to accept it, gosh it was actually just so so dysfunctional. I’m so excited to continue my healing journey!”
-A.S.
The Gentle Practice That Actually Helps: Decompression Breathing
If your pelvic floor is tight and overworked, what she needs isn’t more squeezing. She needs space. She needs softness. She needs a way to return to her natural rhythm, without force, pressure, or strain.
That’s where Decompression Breathing comes in.
This simple, breath-led practice is the foundation of The Core Recovery Method® and it’s the most effective way to restore balance, release tension, and retrain your pelvic floor to work the way it was always designed to.
Here’s why Decompression Breathing works so well:
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It engages 100% of your pelvic floor fibers, not just the ones you can control, but also the deeper, involuntary muscles responsible for continence, support, and core coordination.
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It powerfully activates reflexive movement, helping your muscles respond automatically to daily life, without clenching, bracing, or overthinking.
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It reduces pressure on your pelvic floor by lifting your organs, expanding your ribcage, and creating space in your spine, making it easier for your core system to do her job.
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It restores communication between your pelvic floor, diaphragm, and deep core muscles, bringing back the natural timing and teamwork your body needs to feel stable and supported.
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It improves circulation and oxygenation, sending fresh blood and nutrients to tissues that may have been compressed, fatigued, or forgotten.
This is the kind of healing your body already knows how to do. You’re not forcing it—you’re remembering it.
And that’s what makes this practice so powerful.
It’s not a workout. It’s a remembrance.
How Decompression Breathing Creates Lasting Change
Unlike kegels, which rely on constant effort and conscious control, Decompression Breathing works with your body’s original blueprint. This breathing trains your pelvic floor response reflexively by rising and falling with your diaphragm, without you needing to think about it.
This is how your body was always meant to function. By tapping into your subconscious nervous system that controls those deeper, involuntary muscle fibers (80% of your pelvic floor), you create change from the inside out. You’re not micromanaging your core. You’re restoring the original signals and rhythms that are already there, waiting to be remembered.
And because you’re no longer fighting your body’s natural patterns, that change happens more quickly and it lasts. There’s no need for endless repetitions or daily squeezing. Just breath. Just softness. Just the quiet return to a system that supports you automatically.
Many women feel relief, sometimes immediately, when they begin decompression breathing. The pressure lightens. The urgency fades. The strength returns. With consistent practice, this becomes your new normal: automatic pelvic floor support that carries you through the day with stability and ease.
You don’t have to work harder.
You just have to remember how to move in rhythm with your body again.
You Deserve an Approach That Actually Works
Pelvic floor dysfunction affects at least one in three women, but the real number is likely much higher. So many women suffer in silence, unsure of what’s normal, or convinced they just need to try harder. And yet, for a huge number of women, kegels are not just ineffective, they’re harmful.
If you’ve been doing “all the right things” and still feel frustrated with your symptoms, it’s not because you’re doing it wrong. It’s because you’ve been given an incomplete strategy.
Most pelvic floor dysfunction isn’t about weakness. It’s about tight, overworked muscles that never learned how to relax because they never felt safe enough to.
When you give your body the right environment through breath, alignment, and nervous system support, your pelvic floor doesn’t need to be forced. She naturally remembers how to function again.
You don’t have to keep squeezing.
You don’t have to keep guessing.
And you definitely don’t have to accept leaking, pressure, pain, or disconnection as part of being a mom or part of getting older.
The Core Recovery Method® offers a completely different path that honors your whole system. It teaches your core and pelvic floor to work together automatically, using proven, breath-led practices like decompression breathing to restore natural strength, coordination, and ease.
This is how we address the 80% of pelvic floor that kegels miss.
This is how we create results that last and that fit effortlessly into the life you’re already living.
