Why Releasing the Pelvic Floor After Birth Isn’t Enough

What if persistent pelvic floor tension, heaviness, or pain postpartum isn’t primarily a muscle problem – but a stability problem the muscles are trying to solve? In this short but powerful clinical reminder, Lynn Schulte challenges pelvic health therapists to rethink how they assess and treat the postpartum pelvis. She explains why working with pelvic bones and pelvic floor muscles together can dramatically improve outcomes and why releasing muscles alone can sometimes make symptoms worse. This episode highlights a critical but often overlooked relationship that can transform how you treat the postpartum pelvis.

✨ Key Takeaways for Practitioners

• Pelvic floor muscles often compensate for unstable or malpositioned pelvic bones, especially after birth.
• Releasing pelvic floor tension without addressing the pelvic bones first may worsen pain or heaviness.
• Muscle tone patterns can reveal what the pelvic bones are doing biomechanically
• Combining external bone work with internal pelvic floor treatment can rapidly restore strength, function, and symptom relief.

This episode will challenge practitioners to start listening to the bones, not just the muscles, when evaluating postpartum pelvic dysfunction. Learn more at https://instituteforbirthhealing.com/treating-postpartum-pelvis/.

Have a comment or question about today’s episode? Message Lynn on Instagram or Facebook, or Email Lynn.

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To learn more visit: InstituteforBirthHealing.com

Visit Institute for Birth Healing to learn more about how to care for the pregnant and postpartum body: CLICK HERE

Transcript

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode. And today I want to share with you just a clinical reminder. And if you've been following me for any length of time, you have probably heard me talk about this repeatedly, and I will continue to repeatedly talk about this because of the importance of it.

And the clinical reminder for you today is to always be working with the pelvic floor muscles and the pelvic bones together.

Remember, the pelvic bones will give you insights into the pelvis. The floor muscles actually will give you insights as to what's happening with the pelvic bones and vice versa.

And I want you all, I hope every pelvic health therapist will be working with both the pelvic bones and the pelvic floor muscles together and that we need to be assessing and treating and bringing the pelvic bones into a better position, especially after birth, before we go work with the pelvic muscles.

And if you take my treating the postpartum pelvis course, I talk a lot about what muscles are being impacted from the different patterns that show up in the postpartum pelvis.

And it's just super helpful when you combine working with the pelvic bones and the pelvic muscles together. And nobody else is teaching this.

And so that's why I just want to remind you. If you're doing intravaginal work, your outside hand needs to be on the pelvic bones and come learn from me how to do the Schulte hold, how to use the bones and the muscles together to help get a more effective, easier release of the pelvic tissues, of the pelvic muscles when you do them both together.

Okay. So I know this is going to be a very short episode because I've talked about this in many, many other episodes, but I am going to continue to remind you that the pelvic bones and the pelvic floor muscles work synergistically together.

And if the pelvic bones are not happy, the pelvic floor muscles are not going to be happy. And if you can appreciate where the tension is in whatever muscle it is, if there's coccygeus, the sacrum might be shifted off to a side.

If bilateral coccygeuses have a lot of tension in it, look for sacral flexion. If one transverse perennial body has more tone in it, look for a splay of the ischium on that side.

It tells you what the bones are doing when you have tension in the muscles. And please remember that the muscles, especially after birth, may be trying to help keep the stability of the pelvic bones together.

And that's why there may be massive tension in the pelvic floor muscles. And when you go to release the pelvic floor muscles without addressing the pelvic bones, the pelvic pain gets worse.

If that happens to you, please know that you missed working with the pelvic bones and you need to help bring those bones to a more midline stable position.

Then the pelvic floor muscles can let go of the job that they are trying to do, which is create stability for your client.

And when, when you. You have heaviness in the pelvic floor, postpartum. I see this all the time in my practice.

When we think heaviness, a lot of people go to, oh, there's prolapse there. But no, that heaviness is the pelvic floor muscles tensioning, trying to hold the bones together.

And that when you bring the bones back to its midline position, that heaviness goes away because the muscles can relax and they don't have to do the job of trying to hold things together, which creates tension, which the tension is the heaviness, okay?

And that heaviness can get worse because it gets more tired as the day goes on. So it's very similar to a symptom of prolapse.

And it's not about the organs being out of place. It's about the pelvic bones being widened from the birth.

And by bringing them back together, then the muscles can let go of trying to hold everything together. And that's what's creating heaviness in the first place.

So please. Please keep this in mind and know that once you work with the bones, it's imperative that we also work with the pelvic floor muscles internally as well because we need to reset them in a more shortened position.

We need to help them from being over lengthened by trying to hold the bones together to shortening back up so that they can function, get into that better length tension curve of the musculature and working with the bones and the muscles at the same time can help that to reset in a more normal function.

And then I think you will be extremely surprised at how well the muscles are able to function after that.

In my holistic postpartum body course, I teach an intravaginal protocol that really addresses the bones externally and internally. We address the bladder, the cervix, then we address the muscles.

We address the sphincter muscle. And then. Everything just can function so much better. I am constantly astounded every day in the clinic with the quality of the pelvic floor muscles before I do my intravaginal protocol and then the quality and the strength of the muscles.

Like there are postpartum moms that are able to suck my two fingers up and inside. And it's just incredible the amount of strength that can return in one session when you address what needs to be addressed, especially in our postpartum clients.

So please, please be addressing both the pelvic bones and the pelvic floor muscles together. That is your clinical reminder for today.

Thank you so much for listening in. Please share this with any colleagues that you feel might benefit from this information.

And I will look forward to seeing you all on the next episode. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.