Pelvic Floor Strength Is a Full-Body Strategy — Not a Single Exercise

If you’ve been told that building a strong pelvic floor means doing endless kegels, you’re missing a key part of the picture.

The pelvic floor is not a standalone muscle group — it’s part of an integrated pressure and stability system. It works in coordination with the diaphragm, deep core, glutes, hamstrings, adductors, and even the way your ribs move when you breathe.

This post breaks down seven essential areas that impact pelvic floor strength and gives you movement-based strategies that go far beyond isolated contractions and deep core work.

How the Pelvic Floor Works With the Diaphragm and Core

To understand why isolated kegels aren’t enough, we need to zoom out and look at the bigger picture of how your core system works.

Your pelvic floor is one part of a four-part system known as the core canister:

• The diaphragm sits at the top,
• The pelvic floor at the bottom,
• The deep core (transverse abdominis) wraps around the front and sides,
• The multifidus and other spinal stabilizers support the back.

When you inhale, the diaphragm descends, intra-abdominal pressure increases, and the pelvic floor responds by lengthening to accommodate that pressure. When you exhale, the diaphragm rises and the pelvic floor recoils upward, helping stabilize and support the system.

This rhythm — inhale/descend, exhale/recoil — is critical. It keeps pressure moving in the right direction, supports your organs, and allows your core and pelvic floor to handle load, motion, and breath efficiently.

But when this system is disrupted, whether from pregnancy, injury, breath-holding, poor posture, or bracing strategies, the pelvic floor can lose its responsive capacity. It may stay “on” all the time (hypertonic), remain too lax, or fail to coordinate with movement. That’s when symptoms like leaking, heaviness, or core disconnection often show up.

To rebuild true function, the pelvic floor must work through its full range of motion — not just contract, but also lengthen, relax, and rebound. That’s what many kegel based approaches miss.

You don’t just need to strengthen the pelvic floor — you need to retrain it to respond to pressure, breath, and movement in real time. That’s what the following strategies aim to restore.

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1. Thoracic Mobility: The Foundation for Pressure Management

Thoracic mobility (particularly in the upper back and ribcage) is foundational to how your core and pelvic floor function. The diaphragm attaches to the lower ribs and relies on a mobile ribcage to expand downward and outward during inhalation. When the thoracic spine is stiff or the ribcage remains flared or fixed in one position (a common postpartum adaptation), the diaphragm loses its ability to descend fully.

This limited descent restricts the natural movement of intra abdominal pressure, meaning your pelvic floor can’t respond appropriately. Instead of lengthening and adapting with each breath, it may stay overly contracted, compensate for lost mobility above, or lose its ability to recoil — leading to tension, fatigue, or even leakage under load.

Improving thoracic mobility helps reestablish the full breath cycle: ribs expand, diaphragm descends, pressure distributes evenly, and the pelvic floor responds. This restores the dynamic pressure regulation your system needs — whether you’re breathing, lifting, running, or recovering postpartum.

In short: when the ribcage moves well, the diaphragm moves well and when the diaphragm moves well, the pelvic floor can do its job.

Exercise: Side Lying Thoracic Rotation with Pulldown
Combines rotation with a resisted reach to improve upper back mobility and lateral rib expansion. This opens space for the diaphragm to move and allows the pelvic floor to work as part of the breath cycle.

Exercise: Cable Row with Rotation/Reach
Encourages rotation through the thoracic spine while integrating breath and tension management. As you row and reach, you create space in the ribcage — helping train the core and pelvic floor to respond dynamically.

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2. Adductor Strength: A Direct Line To The Pelvic Floor

Your adductors — the muscles of your inner thighs — play a far greater role in pelvic floor health than most people realize. Anatomically, the adductors share deep fascial, muscular, and neural connections with the pelvic floor. These muscles work in close coordination to stabilize the pelvis, manage movement in the frontal plane (side to side), and provide support during walking, squatting, lifting, and rotation.

When the adductors are weak, underactive, or poorly coordinated, the body often defaults to a compensation strategy and the pelvic floor pays the price. Rather than working responsively with breath and movement, the pelvic floor may kick into overdrive, becoming constantly tense or grippy in an effort to make up for missing stability elsewhere. This can contribute to symptoms like pelvic pain, leaking with load, or the sensation that your pelvic floor is “always on.”

Strengthening the adductors helps redistribute muscular support through the inner thighs and deep core, allowing the pelvic floor to relax, lengthen, and respond more appropriately to movement. These muscles also play a key role in midline control, pelvic alignment, and coordination with the deep core. All essential for rebuilding core and pelvic floor function postpartum.

By training the adductors in different contexts (like lateral lunges or adductor side planks) you’re not just building strength. You’re restoring the interconnected system that allows your pelvic floor to stabilize, yield, and rebound the way it’s designed to.

Exercise: Lateral Lunge with Band Resisted Adduction
Challenges frontal plane control and adductor strength, while also reinforcing hip and pelvic stability. The band resistance trains dynamic control into the midline — a key element for pelvic floor coordination.

Exercise: Side Plank with Adduction
Uses the inner thigh of the bottom leg to lift and stabilize. This not only activates the adductors but trains them in an isometric, anti-rotation setting — mimicking how they support pelvic floor function in real life.

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3. Hamstring Strength: Posterior Chain Support For the Pelvis

The hamstrings play a crucial role in pelvic positioning and core coordination, yet they’re often overlooked in pelvic floor rehab. These muscles anchor the base of the pelvis and influence how the pelvis tilts, how the sacrum aligns, and how pressure is managed through the posterior chain.

When the hamstrings are strong and active, they help posteriorly tilt the pelvis just enough to maintain a neutral alignment, allowing the diaphragm, core, and pelvic floor to work together as a pressure-regulating unit. But when the hamstrings are underactive or weak (which is common postpartum), the pelvis often shifts into an anterior tilt — tipping forward and disrupting the stacked alignment of the ribcage over the pelvis.

This shift may seem small, but it has a big downstream effect: it places the pelvic floor in a chronically lengthened or inefficient position, making it harder to contract and coordinate with breath. Over time, this can contribute to symptoms like heaviness, instability, or difficulty generating core tension during movement.

Rebuilding hamstring strength helps restore balance between the front and back of the body, encouraging better pelvic control and intra-abdominal pressure regulation. Movements like hinge variations, or eccentric hamstring curls build strength while reinforcing alignment, allowing the pelvic floor to respond appropriately, rather than compensate.

Your hamstrings aren’t just about strong legs — they’re essential teammates in supporting the pelvis and freeing up the pelvic floor to do its job.

Exercise: Supine Leg Curl with Slider
This movement strengthens the hamstrings through a full range of motion, teaching posterior chain control in a supine (core-friendly) position. Bonus: it trains eccentric control and core engagement without excessive load.

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4. Glute Strength: Powerhouse of Pelvic Control

The glutes — especially the glute max and glute med — are central to hip stability, pelvic positioning, and full-body force production. They’re the powerhouse of the posterior chain and a key driver in movements like walking, lifting, running, and transitioning between positions. But they’re also deeply connected to the stability and function of the pelvic floor.

When the glutes are strong and firing well, they help maintain a neutral, supported pelvis. This allows for efficient transfer of force through the hips and core, and gives the pelvic floor the foundation it needs to activate, relax, and coordinate with breath and load.

But when the glutes are weak, under-recruited, or poorly integrated (which is incredibly common postpartum due to alignment changes and reduced loading) the body often compensates. The pelvic floor may step in to provide stability, staying in a chronically tight or overactive state. Other small stabilizers around the hips and low back may also overwork, leading to discomfort, tension, or inefficient movement patterns.

Training the glutes — particularly in single-leg, hinge-based, and frontal plane patterns — not only builds strength, but restores the core-pelvic-hip relationship that’s vital for pressure management and dynamic pelvic floor support. Exercises like the wall-supported single leg deadlift allow the glutes to drive movement while encouraging proper pelvic alignment and core control.

Your pelvic floor doesn’t want to be the main stabilizer. It wants to be part of a responsive system. Building strong, well-integrated glutes helps offload unnecessary tension and gives the pelvic floor space to function more efficiently and reflexively.

Exercise: Landmine Single Leg Deadlift
The landmine variation adds a guided path and slight resistance arc, making it easier to maintain a stacked torso and neutral spine throughout the movement. It lights up the glutes and hamstrings while minimizing compensation, and the grounded end of the bar helps stabilize rotation — ideal for reconnecting core-to-hip control. This version is especially helpful for teaching breath and load coordination, giving the pelvic floor the support it needs to respond reflexively instead of gripping.

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5. Oblique & Serratus Integration: Anti-Extension + Rib Stack

The obliques (internal and external) and the serratus anterior play a pivotal role in creating and maintaining the ribcage-over-pelvis alignment that’s essential for effective core and pelvic floor function. They’re not just accessory muscles — they’re central to how your body organizes pressure and stabilizes itself under load.

The obliques help wrap and compress the abdominal wall, providing dynamic control through rotation, side bending, and anti-extension. Meanwhile, the serratus anchors the scapula and facilitates rib cage movement and closure — especially during breath and reach-based patterns. Together, these muscles create the conditions for a “stacked” core canister, where the diaphragm, pelvic floor, and deep core can communicate and function as a unit.

When these muscles are underactive, undertrained, or disconnected (which often happens postpartum), the ribcage may stay flared, the diaphragm becomes less effective, and the pelvic floor may either lose coordination or become chronically tense to make up for lost pressure control. You might see symptoms like doming during core work, difficulty regulating breath under load, or leaking despite doing traditional “core” exercises.

Integrating oblique and serratus work — especially with breath and reach strategies — helps retrain the ribcage to move and close dynamically. This improves intra-abdominal pressure management, restores rib-pelvis stacking, and gives the pelvic floor the ability to respond, rather than brace.

Movements like hooklying kettlebell reaches and side-lying hip lifts with banded reach bring these connections back online — teaching your body to move pressure effectively and reestablish the rhythmic relationship between breath, core, and pelvic floor.

Exercise: Hooklying Kettlebell Reach
A grounded setup that trains core engagement through breath, reach, and posterior expansion. The reach promotes rib closure and core canister alignment — improving pelvic floor responsiveness.

Exercise: Side Lying Hip Lift with Banded Reach
Adds lateral hip engagement with a resisted reach to wake up obliques, glutes, and serratus. This teaches how to coordinate lateral stability and core-pelvic integration.

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6. Breath + Load Strategy: Pressure Meets Performance

One of the most overlooked yet essential aspects of pelvic floor recovery is how you breathe — especially under load. Breath is not just about oxygen; it’s the driver of intra-abdominal pressure. And how that pressure is managed determines whether the pelvic floor is supported or overloaded.

On every inhale, your diaphragm descends, intra-abdominal pressure increases, and the pelvic floor should reflexively lengthen to accommodate that pressure. On the exhale, the diaphragm rises and the pelvic floor recoils, contributing to core tension and stability. This is the natural pressure system your body uses to stabilize the spine, support movement, and coordinate the pelvic floor.

But when this breath-to-core coordination is disrupted — from postural changes, shallow breathing, bracing habits, or high stress — the system can’t regulate pressure effectively. The pelvic floor may become rigid, overactive, or disconnected, often compensating for lost stability. Add load (like lifting weights or even managing a toddler), and the pressure challenge increases. If the system isn’t responsive, symptoms like leaking, bulging, or low back pain can surface.

Breath and load need to be trained together. Not in isolation, and not in rigid patterns. Movements like 90/90 alternating heel taps with a banded reach teach your system to maintain alignment and pressure regulation in a low-load setting. On the other end, movements like the tempo hack squat off the wall layer in more demand — training your pelvic floor to adapt under load without over-gripping.

This is where pelvic floor strength becomes functional: not just strong at rest, but responsive, adaptable, and tuned in to how your body moves, breathes, and stabilizes under challenge.

Exercise: Tempo Hack Squat Off Wall
Slows down the descent to train eccentric control, glute-quadriceps coordination, and breath strategy under load. An excellent way to reinforce pelvic pressure management during lower body strength work.

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7. Plyometric Progression: The Final Frontier

Once the foundational pieces — breath, alignment, strength, and coordination — are in place, the next step is teaching the pelvic floor to respond to speed, force, and impact. That’s where plyometrics come in.

The pelvic floor isn’t just responsible for support and control. It also needs to react quickly. In real life, we don’t always move slowly or predictably. We run, jump, pivot, pick up kids mid-motion, and land from unexpected angles. Your pelvic floor needs to be able to absorb impact, rebound, and stabilize dynamically, not just contract during a kegel.

This is especially important postpartum. During pregnancy and birth, the pelvic floor stretches and adapts dramatically. While regaining baseline strength and coordination is essential, stopping there leaves a gap — especially if your goals include high-intensity training, running, or simply being responsive to life’s daily demands.

Plyometric drills help bridge that gap by retraining the timing and elasticity of the pelvic floor. Movements like lateral bounds challenge your ability to manage ground reaction forces, shift weight, and stabilize dynamically — all while requiring the pelvic floor to respond reflexively, not with conscious effort.

Importantly, these aren’t the first exercises you do postpartum. They’re part of a progression — but they’re just as critical as breathwork or strength. A well-functioning pelvic floor isn’t just strong; it’s reactive, resilient, and ready for the real world.

Exercise: Lateral Bounds
Trains frontal plane power, ground reaction force, and timing. The pelvic floor is challenged to adapt quickly — all while integrating breath, core, and hip control.

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Final Thoughts

You don’t need more deep core work — you need more coordination.

By training thoracic mobility, glute and adductor strength, breath mechanics, and load strategy, you’re not just building pelvic floor strength… you’re building systemic function.

Your pelvic floor responds to how you move!

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