Using Your Voice To Help Your Pelvic Floor In Childbirth

Last week I wrote about the voice and pelvic floor connections. You can read that post here. I briefly mentioned in that blog about using your voice during childbirth to help the pelvic floor. I want to expand upon that today.

The vocal cords and the pelvic floor muscles have a similar layout and pattern. (I can't find a shareable image, but you can look at the vocal cords here and the pelvic floor muscles in the picture below.

Pelvic floor muscles looking from the bottom side

How the voice and pelvic floor are connected

What we think is that in general, what the mouth is doing is what the pelvic floor will mimic. For example, if you are holding your breath and clenching your teeth, then likely your pelvic floor muscles will also be tight and tense. And we think the opposite is also true. If your mouth is relaxed then your pelvic floor muscles will also be relaxed.

When I see pregnant people in pelvic floor therapy to prepare for childbirth we talk about, and train for, the pelvic floor muscles to be relaxed when in active labor. We want those muscles to be stretchable and out of the way so baby can come out as easily as possible in a vaginal birth. We don't want the pelvic floor muscles to be tense as that can inhibit a vaginal birth and potentially lead to more tearing.

Also the pitch of the sound that comes out of the mouth has an effect on the pelvic floor.

Think about a high pitched sound like singing "lalalala". Try it with me now. You know you are. If you can tune into your pelvic floor you should feel it tightening and pulling up. I almost feel my entire body pulling up toward the ceiling when I sing that. We don't want that in childbirth. We want the opposite to occur.

What we want our voice to do in childbirth

In childbirth this is one of the few times we want the pelvic floor muscles to actually push out and we can use our voice to aid this by using lower tone sounds. Think of someone at a football game yelling "Booooo" that is a low tone sounds and if you do it with me and really tune into your body you should feel your stomach and pelvic floor pushing down and out. That is what we want in childbirth.

If you are pregnant, think about this and use it to your advantage in labor and delivery. If you want to learn more ways to prepare your pelvic floor for childbirth, check out my online course all about this. Using your voice is one section of this course. There are many more videos in the course teaching you all the ways you can prepare for your birth in order to have the least amount of tearing in your pelvic floor muscles.