Are you ashamed to talk about your pelvic floor? You're not alone. Millions of women suffer from incontinence and other pelvic floor disorders, but they're often too embarrassed to seek help.
In this episode of The Hormone Prescription Podcast, we're joined by Jana Danielson, a pelvic floor specialist who's here to dish the secrets to pelvic floor success. From how to keep things tight down there to how to manage incontinence, Jana's got the lowdown on everything you need to know about keeping your pelvic floor healthy and happy.
Jana Danielson helps women have better pelvic floor function by using the Cooch Ball, the world’s first patented pelvic floor fitness tool for women. She is an Amazon Best Selling Author, the Founder of Lead Pilates and Lead Integrated Health Therapies, and the Metta District, an online wellness community. Jana has coached and consulted with tens of thousands of women from all over the world to help improve their quality of life, their confidence, and their impact in this world.
In this episode, you'll learn:
The symptoms of a weak pelvic floor and how to know if you have one
How the pelvic floor is connected to the whole body and why it's important to keep it strong
The secrets to pelvic floor success
How to keep things tight down there
How to manage incontinence
The importance of pelvic floor health
So, whether you're suffering in silence or just want to learn more about how to take care of your lady parts, this is the episode for you! Tune in now and get started on your journey to pelvic floor success.
(00:00): Joseph Pilates said, breath is the first and last act of life. And somewhere in the middle, we forget how to do it. What does this have to do with the secrets to pelvic floor success, stay tuned and you'll find out.
(00:15): So the big question is how do women over 40, like us keep weight off, have great energy balance. Our hormones in our moods feel sexy and confident and master midlife. If you're like most of us, you are not getting the answers you need and remain confused and pretty hopeless to ever feel like yourself. Again. As an OB GYN, I had to discover for myself the truth about what creates our rock solid metabolism, lasting weight loss, and supercharged energy. After 40 in order to lose a hundred pounds and fix my fatigue. Now I'm on a mission. This podcast is designed to share the natural tools you need for impactful results. And to give you clarity on the answers to your midlife metabolism challenges, join me for tangible natural strategies to crush the hormone imbalances you are facing and help you get unstuck from the sidelines of life. My name is Dr. Kyrin Dunston welcome to the hormone prescription podcast.
(01:09): Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the hormone prescription with Dr. Kyrin. Thanks so much for joining me today. We're talking about pelvic floor disorders and how to be successful in helping and healing them today with Jana Danielson, you're gonna love her. It really struck me how incredibly revolutionary what she has created is after I interviewed her and looked more into the product that she's developed and the educational platform that she's developed for women suffering with pelvic floor disorders, which is, mm, a lot of us as we age, frankly, and she's gonna go through, how do you identify if you have a pelvic floor disorder, it's not really common Parlin that we say, Hey, do you have a pelvic floor disorder? And so she's gonna talk about the symptoms that you would be having that could alert you, that you have some type of pelvic floor dysfunction going on.
(02:12): And more than that, she's got solutions, amazing solutions. And I really love how, when we lean into the problems that we're so hard, lean into those questions that we can come up with some revolutionary answers and solutions. And Jana did just that. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about her and then we'll get started. So Jana Danielson helps women have better pelvic floor function by using the cooch ball. The world's first patented pelvic floor fitness tool for women. She's an Amazon bestselling author, the founder of lead Pilates and lead integrated health therapies and the meta district, an online wellness community, Jana has coached and consulted with tens of thousands of women from all over the world world to help improve their quality of life, their confidence, and their impact in this world. Welcome Jana.
(03:06): Thank you, Dr. Dunston. It's great to be here.
(03:09): I'm so excited to have you join me today. We haven't really talked about pelvic floor health on the podcast, how that's happened. I don't even know cuz it's a super important topic and you've created an amazing product for women to use before we talk about that. Can you talk a little bit about how you became so interested in and became an expert in pelvic floor health for women?
(03:33): Yeah, absolutely. So I am the mom of three boys. They're now 17, 19 and 21. So I, it's not like I'm a new mom, but in my career I had a career shift about 16 or 17 years ago from the world of corporate into wellness, entrepreneurship and Pilates actually for me became a vehicle that I used for my own healing. A lot of undiagnosed pain, a lot of protecting a lot of holding, a lot of tension in my body, which created a lot of dysfunction and a lot of disconnection from my body. And so through Pilates, I started to understand the way our body worked as systems. You know, we're not pieces. We think sometimes were arms and legs and organs and skin and hair. And, but we're much more than that. We're a skeletal system and lymphatic system and a reproductive system and a digestive system.
(04:26): And what I started learning through my training and my own healing was that these systems when compromised are not just standalone compromised systems, they're gonna impact other systems in the body. And when that happens, using the hyphenated word, DISE dis-ease is one of the outcomes that can be present in the body. And that's what was happening with me. I became a very, I was, I looked seemingly healthy on the outside, but on the inside I was slowly, I felt like I was slowly dying. I was losing my voice. I became a very, not so confident. Young woman didn't know if I'd ever be able to be a mom. Didn't know why I would marry my high school sweetheart, who just proposed to me because my body was not working for me. And when I found Pilates, it completely changed my life. And as part of that, I guess, experience 16 weeks into starting my Pilates journey. I was off all 11 medications that I had been prescribed to manage different symptoms that I had been experiencing for two years prior to that. And it really intrigued me.
(05:36): Could you talk a little bit about what was going on for you in detail? Like you said, your body just wasn't working for you, you're on all these medications. I know everybody's wondering like what in the world was happening.
(05:47): So for me it was manifesting or presenting itself as digestive pain. And this had started when I think back to it, like back in high school, I am the first born child. I am a pretty driven individual and I would get this pain. And I always in my mind just thought, well that's because I am vying for that high mark on that test. Or I wanna make that team or I want it right. And I just chalked it up to nerves. My little small town doctor also chalked it up to nerves and I just started taking tongues. Cause I just thought it was, you know, a little bit of acid in my gut. And it turned out to be much more than that. The pain, it was like a, a baseball size pain just back from my belly button. And it would overcome me. I would be doubled over.
(06:37): It was hard to breathe. I would find myself sitting at my desk at work, kind of pressing the angle of the desk into just above my belly button and I would breathe and that would kind of calm it down for me. It hurt when I moved, it hurt when I didn't move. It hurt when I was sexual with my then fiance, it hurt when I was going for groceries it, so I actually named my pain. I named my pain, the edge and it personified that part of me that I had zero control over and it helped me to, to cope. Right. And so the medications started to get added on as I went through a process of specialist specialist specialist, this test, that test to the point where I sat with members of my medical team. And they told me that they believed that the pain was in my head and that I was seeking attention and that there was nothing more that they could do for me.
(07:31): And so that's when Pilates, it was a dark time for me. I was in a very, not so great space in my mind. Back then, I wouldn't have said that I was depressed, but as I look back, yeah, I was. And what I decided one day when I saw Madonna on the cover of a fitness magazine in the grocery store and it had the word Pilates splashed across it, I decided that I would buy that magazine and read that article because I was a big Madonna fan. And what I read was words that talked about alignment of the spine and breathing with this muscle called the diaphragm and balance with the front of the body and the back of the body. And there was words like eccentric, like length and muscles. And I thought, oh, this is kind of like yoga. I should do this.
(08:18): You know, I had a yoga practice and I went to my first Pilates class and it actually was one of the most disturbing <laugh> lack of confidence, 50 minutes of my life. And if I wasn't such darn keener, and if I hadn't taken my new Pilates mat to the front row of that class, I would've rolled it up and I would've made a B line, but I, I went right to the front right by the instructor. And when she started speaking to me that day, she should have been speaking a foreign language because she was saying things like inhale through your nose to expand the space in your torso, exhale out of your mouth, make this H a ha sound. As you let the air exit and you let your ribs melt into, like, she was saying these things. And I was like, what is she actually saying?
(09:08): Cause my down body would not do any of it. And I didn't know, should I laugh or should I cry? And, and after the class I rolled up my mat and my instructor walked up to me and she, well, she said to me, just hang, hang out for a few minutes. So she said goodbye to everybody else. She walked up to me, and she wrapped her arms around me. And I melted, I burst into tears because for the first time in my life, I actually did not know what was wrong with me because I couldn't do the simple act of breathing. The first thing we do when we
(09:48): On
(09:48): His body, right, is we take that first big gasp of air and we breathe. I couldn't even do that. And it was very humbling for me. And all my instructors said to me that day was come back on Thursday. That's all she said. And she opened up her arms and I walked out and my husband was waiting for me or my fiance at that point was waiting for me outside. And I walked out and it looked like I was chopping onions. My eyes were like red and puffy from crying. And he is like, what the hell just happened in that class? Like why, why, why are you on your knees crying? And I was like, I just have to come back on Thursday. That's all I kept saying, I have to come back on Thursday. And that was one of those defining moments for me in my life, where I was, where I realized maybe I was looking in the wrong place for my healing. Maybe I actually had the empowerment to see within me if I could heal here first. And that's what I did. And over the next 16 weeks, I went twice a week to that class and I practiced and I practiced and I practiced. And by Christmas of that year, I had weaned myself off of all 11 of my medications. And I was just ripe for wanting to know more about the body. And that's really how my journey started.
(11:08): Okay. Yeah. You know, we who do yoga, we think we know Pilates, and then you go to a Pilates class and you're like, I don't know Jack about this and the breathing I'm with you. You go. And it's like, have I ever breathed the breath in my life? You think where you go to Pilates? Like you're doing it all wrong. OK. So that started your journey. And then you eventually became a master teacher, and you've got companies that teach Pilates. Yeah. And so what led to the pelvic floor revelation?
(11:39): Yeah. So for me through my Pilates training and going to different conferences and meeting different people, I was always intrigued. So before Pilates, I used to teach other forms of fitness. And I never had heard before that the pelvic floor was a part of the core. I always thought your erectus abs and your O Bleaks and your transverse abs, that was your core. And as I started to learn that the core, the way I was taught is a cylindrical-shaped system. You have on the very outer layer at the front of your body, your six pack, right? Those reus, a dominance, and then deeper to that, you have the sling system of the internal and external or external O Bleaks that twist you and, you know, pick up your purse off the floor. Then you've got those deep transverse abs that start in your low back, wrapped to your front, like a corset to give you shape and posture security for your POS or for your organs.
(12:35): But then there's a top and a bottom to that cylinder. The diaphragm is the main muscle of respiration like that mushroom cap sits at the top of the cylinder of the core. And the pelvic floor finishes the structure as the floor of the core. And I was like, okay, wait a minute. So this is actually true when I'm doing my abdominal work through Pilates or before I used to teach boot camps. I never ever once cued my own body or cued my clients to activate their pelvic floor as they were doing a plank or doing, you know, curling up doing a roll up in Pilates. And I was like, how did I miss this? What did I do to miss this major fact? And so I just started digging more and more and more. And through my learning, I understood that the diaphragm and the pelvic floor work in a unit as a system like BFFs in the body.
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