Why Pelvic Floor Advice Goes Off The Rails Online

A scary headline can change how you move for months, even if the caption “adds nuance.” We’re talking about that uncomfortable truth and why it matters so much in pregnancy and postpartum fitness, where pelvic floor anxiety, diastasis recti worries, and return-to-exercise pressure are already high.

We break down the rise of emotional hooks in social media marketing and how phrases like “ruining your pelvic floor” are built to stop your scroll, not to educate you. I share why our brains cling to threat-based messages (negative saliency bias), how misinformation can spread even when someone means well, and why the first thing people do is check the comments to see if everyone agrees. We also get real about the creator side: the push to post with total confidence, the temptation to trade context for reach, and how hard it can be to challenge peers publicly without it turning into personal conflict.

Then we pivot to practical solutions you can use today. If you’re a mom or mom-to-be, you’ll learn how to “train” your algorithm by using notifications, marking content as not interested, and choosing long-form education where evidence-based pelvic floor physical therapy and postpartum recovery guidance can actually fit. If you’re a provider, we talk about finding a middle ground: getting attention without causing harm, holding our professions accountable, and connecting through stories without projecting our own fears onto someone else.

If this helps you see your feed differently, subscribe, share it with a friend who’s overwhelmed by postpartum advice, and leave a review so more people can find calmer, more accurate pelvic health information.

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Transcript

Welcome And A Big Milestone

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hello everyone and welcome to the Barbell Mamas Podcast. My name is Christina Prevett. I'm a public floor physical therapist, researcher in exercise and pregnancy, and a mom of two who has competed in prostitut, powerlifting, or weightlifting, pregnant, postpartum, or both. In this podcast, we want to talk about the realities of being a mom who loves to exercise. Whether you're a recreational exerciser or an athlete, we want to talk about all of the things that we go through as females going into this motherhood journey. We're gonna talk about fertility, pregnancy, and postpartum topics that are relevant to the active individual. While I am a pelvic floor physical therapist, I am not your pelvic floor physical therapist and know that this podcast does not substitute medical advice. All right, come along for this journey with us while we navigate motherhood together. And I can't wait to get excited. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Barbell Mamas podcast. Christina Prebbitt here. And before I start today's episode and kind of talk about social media and public floor PT in the world of social media, I just want to say an absolutely massive thank you. I went onto our podcast platform and was just looking at our statistics. To be honest, it's not something that I look at all the time because this podcast for me is so much more about trying to get information out that is nuanced and contextualized to anyone who is willing to listen. But we just passed a hundred thousand downloads on the podcast. And that is so amazing. Um, this is absolutely a labor of love for me. We've been doing this now for almost four years and just talking through all the new information and pregnancy postpartum, motherhood, etc. And it's just so cool to see that there are so many of you who maybe got to access this information. And it's kind of perfect because there's been a lot of discussion online about pelvic PT and the way that our language has changed or that our language is morphing in in 2026 and trends come and go. So we're gonna see this, but it is just really cool to see that there are so many of you that are willing to sit and hear me um do the true like yap. I know yapping is really popular on social media right now, but um when you're yapping for 20 to 30 minutes in a podcast episode, I feel like that is just so different. It's such a whole other can of worms. And I just, I'm just so thankful for you all. So thank you so much for our all of you that are our listening, past, present, and hopefully future, because we're gonna keep showing up imperfectly and through the chaos, of course. Um,

Why Shock Posts Get Clicks

SPEAKER_00 3:05

just trying to do our best here um to help serve the moms and moms to be. What I wanted to talk about today in today's podcast was a lot of the discourse that is happening online. I posted about emotional hooks. And I posted these three exercises are ruining your pelvic floor. And firstly, I was so jazzed that everyone was legit shocked that I would write a post like that. And then they swipe and they realize that I was talking about kind of the nuance of marketing on social media. And so I was first and foremost just so excited that people were like, oh my gosh, I did not expect this from Christina's account, or that this feels like something that wouldn't come from her. Did her account get hacked? I was getting those messages, and I love that because I have worked really hard to try and again imperfectly try and disseminate nuance and do scientific communication well. What I was trying to get at with that post is that with the insurgence of online business owners and full disclosure, I make money online, right? I teach courses to other con ed providers. Like I'm a con ed provider, so I teach clinicians, pelvic health content, and geriatric content as a big part of my job. And so this is absolutely in no way being negative about somebody who wants to make money online. That it is absolutely not. And I think it's really cool that we are in this place where in 2026 there are all these ways for pelvic PTs to provide value. And there is space for many. And there is a lot of discussion in the professional spaces around what it means to be a pelvic provider, who is providing these programs, how to vet your sources, the skills that online teaches you versus what you learn when you're in the trenches in one-on-one care. Like that's a whole other discussion. This is not about that. What this is, is the reality that when you go into online business or when you are a business owner, you have your clinical brain and then you have your marketing brain. And in 2026, and it's kind of been this way for a really long time, we are in the business of grabbing people's attention. And so if you are taking a marketing course or you are learning about social media marketing, or you are learning about showing up for online products, et cetera, they talk a lot about the art of the hook and how nuanced and flowery language is a big no-no. Like it is actively discouraged online. And the reason for that is because when we are thinking about grabbing people's attention, our attention span is really short. And you need to really be grabbing someone's attention in less than two seconds, or they're gonna scroll or swipe away from the content that you are trying to deliver. And it can be the best information in the world. Your clinical brain could have put a ton of time, energy, and attention into creating that message. But the reality on the marketing side is that if somebody doesn't stay to digest that information, then it kind of goes nowhere. And so many people are trying to learn the art of the hook and how to package information. A big one that's really popular right now, which I've seen everywhere, is the Yap Challenge, is like talking about how to be relatable and how to create messages and find your people, find your tribe online. Love that. Where we tend to drift is that those emotional hooks can very quickly turn into misinformation, right? These three exercises are ruining your pelvic floor. Doing these three things too early could sabotage your postpartum recovery. This is ruining your abdominal wall. These exercises danger, these put you at risk for all these problems, postpartum, or don't ignore this sign. It could be the sign of something tragic. It's all of this negative skew slanted information meant to grab someone's attention. It is not meant to apply nuance. Often, what happens is then once you have that attention, many people try in the caption to put a lot of the contextualized nuance in. The problem is that the damage is already done. Like your body, our brain has a negative saliency bias, which means that our psychology primes us to be looking for threats. And so we are way more likely to pay attention to a negative message than a positive one. Number one. And number two, we tend to hold on to that information for a really long time, especially if it was the first piece of information about a said topic area that you digested. And it takes a lot of intention and exposure to remove that bias. I see this all the time when, for example,

When Hooks Turn Into Misinformation

SPEAKER_00 8:55

I am working with my older adults around falls. They get to a certain age, and every time they start interacting with healthcare, they get told, just be careful, don't fall. If you could fall, if you fall, you could break your hip 50-50 shot. You're here in a year. And it starts pretty early, you know, like in your 50s and your 60s, some of these messages of like, well, you know, you're not as young as you used to be start coming into our narrative. And so by the time I see them and they're 70, 75, they have lost so much of their capacity, partly because they've been encouraged over and over and over again to do less, or that their body is meant to do less. And there's a balancing act, obviously, around meeting your body where it's at. But also there are very real negative consequences to that messaging for them. So when I see this in the pregnancy and postpartum space, and gosh, there's just so many examples. Like people are like, well, you know, you may not have those prolab symptoms now, but if you start exercising early, you may doom yourself for dysfunction when you're in menopause. It's like, yeah, but you have no idea. Like, you've no idea if that's the case. Maybe, but all of our evidence is showing yes, your obstetrical history matters, but also the amount of time you're standing against gravity, chronic cough, straining constipation, your genetics, and your BMI times 30 years. Are we really gonna attribute your risk to three workouts that you did before six weeks and scare the bejeebas out of you about that? Like, you know, and it's meant to be helpful. Like a lot of these women are trying to build businesses because they they are working in a space where they have felt the transformative nature of pelvic floor dysfunction. They felt the transformative nature of motherhood and how hard that recovery process can be in pregnancy and postpartum. But the drift happens, right? The drift happens where it starts out with nuanced language. It's not getting a ton of traction online. And so we take different tactics and we put it into Claude or ChatGBT or Gemini or whatever these AI systems are, which I leverage, by the way, um, in a different way. But of course, I'm gonna be looking at adopting some of this new technology, but they're going to give you the sensationalized hooky version. But if you use that sensational hookie version and all of a sudden, instead of getting 400 views, you're getting 1600 views, you're like, well, I'm gonna do that, right? Because more people are seeing my content. I want my social media platform to grow. And I understand the second part of this, and one of the things that I think is interesting is that we are also in this space, in the rehab space, but also in like female dominant spaces where challenging each other is a big topic of discussion, right? And there's there's kind of both sides. In the world of pelvic PT, I feel like there's a lot of like raw-rah female empowerment, which I love. But the negative translation of that is often like, you should never challenge me in public. How dare you challenge me in public? And on the other side of that, we're seeing in some medical spaces that the way that people are being challenged online is seen as overly aggressive. And so when we have this issue where we are seeing this drift happen, or I am seeing this drift happen, I have struggled tremendously with one, how to show up, right? And and I've gotten into that comparison game as well. I know I could have way more followers online if I just said, ah, F it, and I'm gonna just post in the most sensationalized way possible. I'm not gonna go to nuance at all and I'm just gonna like flood the system with a ton of information. I'm a pelvic PT. I've been in practice for 10 years. I'm a mother of two, almost three. I've also experienced miscarriage, I've also experienced pelvic floor dysfunction, including prolapse, disparating urinary incontinence, and I'm pregnant with my third, right? Like I have a lot of street cred and I'm a pregnancy researcher, which I didn't even post about, right? So I have that street cred. I could do that. I I just obviously don't believe in it. But it's difficult when you're seeing people who are doing it and they're going from, you know, zero to a hundred thousand followers and they're getting all these opportunities. I totally understand. And it can be really hard to stick to that voice when when it's when it's really challenging. And so when we have this and it's almost like build, it's like building momentum right now, and it's kind of everywhere. And how do you approach it? Here's a couple things that I believe. Number one is when I am making comments online, I am challenging the idea and I am not challenging the person, right? I am not saying you are a really trashy provider for putting this type of thing online. Or how dare you, you terrible pelvic PT, you're the worst, you must be so dumb when you do this. I often challenge and I try and say it in a nice way like, I love that you are advocating for women. What we know now in the 2025 guideline is this, or you know, I always think about being careful about my language because of the way that this can be interpreted. I will put those into public spaces. Why?

Fear Based Messaging And Long Term Harm

SPEAKER_00 14:55

Because when I'm gonna say power, but it's not it kind of is power in social media, um goes unchecked in public spaces, it grows and it gets worse, right? Number one. Number two is that people check the comments when they hear something or see something and it emotionally hooks them. The first thing they do is they're like, oh my gosh, does everybody in the comments agree with that? And they go to the comments right away. Have I also gone privately? Yes. Have I also been called a mean girl, unprofessional, that I'm not women supporting women? Yeah, and it really sucks. I know in my soul that I work really hard to advocate for women, and so I have to take it in the chin. Where sometimes when people don't like my delivery and I am not perfect at all, that they're gonna respond very emotionally to me. And not everybody is going to like being checked online. One of the things, though, is that we are lifelong learners. Everybody should be a lifelong work. Motherhood is lifelong learning. Like, we never got it figured out that you layer in something else or another complexity. Like, as coaches and exercise professionals, we are lifelong learners. What I used to say in 2021 is not even close to what I say now. Like, I'm almost embarrassed about if you went back, if you really wanted to do a check of things that I used to say versus things I say now. Like it has changed so much. My own data has forced me to change my own narrative, which I freaking love. That is not a bad thing. And when we are in school, this idea around giving and receiving feedback is so pivotal. And in research, I was the dumbest person. I still am the dumbest person in the room in a lot of the rooms that I am in. And I love that for me because it always makes me fact-check, it always makes me very aware and go in with the assumption that I don't know everything. And there's no way I'm ever going to know everything. But in social media land, you have to say things with your whole chest. You have to say things with so much confidence. And so, first and foremost, I think it's so important for the consumer to understand what is happening. That is why I posted that, right? The emotional hook piece. I needed people to understand what was happening because I can't fact-check every single person in pregnancy and postpartum. And there is no governing body that is saying, hey, you are actually saying something quite harmful. I was audited by the College of Physiotherapists of Ontario every 10 years or so, expect an audit in our profession and in my uh province. And my social media came up and they were looking through my social media to make sure that I wasn't drifting from the social media standard that was outlined by our professional governing body. But so many people do not have that. I know that in many areas in other countries, they are not monitoring social media well or often unless a complaint comes in and they don't have the capacity to do it either. And so a lot of times this doesn't really get checked very much. And so I was lucky that I did have a check by my college to make sure that what I'm doing is above board and kind of in line with what they're looking for. But the other side of it is that because of that, right, it's just easy for that stuff to drift. And so when you're never getting that feedback anymore, you're working on your own and you're the boss. So you're not getting checked on your messaging, your marketing is your metric, your KPI, your key performance indicator, then the consumer first and foremost has to understand what's happening because if they can sift through that information well, then they can really think about who they're following, really like sleuth out the credentials and the background and the messaging and how they feel when they are listening to the messaging of that person. They can stay and try and stick to really trusted providers. The second thing that I would really recommend people do is they turn on notifications to providers they want to hear from, because the algorithm has changed really from a follower-centric feed to a content or attention-grabbing feed. And this has changed in the last little while, and this has made this really pervasive because now your reels, your TikTok uh videos, yes, sometimes there can be an increased frequency when you are following a person on your feed, but very often it shows you things that you are pausing on. And those emotional negative hooks are things that you pause on. And because of that, it puts you down this algorithm rabbit hole. And so putting on notifications from people you really want to see information from, and then specifically saying interested or not interested in specific types of content. If you go into the three dots, you can say, I want

How To Challenge Ideas Without Attacking

SPEAKER_00 20:40

to see more of this and I want to see less of this. And like I've put like baby animal videos is sometimes what I want to see more of, and less of very highly sensationalized or really negative content. And that could be really helpful. Um, understanding that behavior is super important. The second thing, so that's the consumer side. The second piece is providing nuanced, concept, contextualized based information in long form content. And so a lot of my reels and my things are now my goal for 2026 is to lead into my podcast, my Substack, obviously, my courses, because I teach, and that's a great way to get, you know, 16 hours in front of us, like with context information, but lead to longer form content, right? Um the reason for that is because snapshots and 40 to 90 second reels can give you a lot of information, but they can't give you all the information. Like I've been chatting here for 20 minutes about my one carousel reel, right? And so my goal is to move people to long form content. And I think a lot of people are craving that information. And so having options and Opportunities for long-form content, I think, is going to be really helpful in 2026 and beyond to help individuals really sift through. And then number three is to put that pressure on my profession, right? And it's not bad pressure. It's when we hold ourselves accountable, our professions all grow. And so if you're in the motherhood space, doula, midwife, Cairo, uh, exercise professional, fitness professional, perinatal specialist, OBGYN, urology, family physician, anybody who's kind of interacting with women, I will always try and advocate positively to make sure that we are reflective in our practice. Because when we drift too far, our entire profession suffers. This could be a whole podcast in and of itself. But for example, we have seen scenarios of certain, for example, chiropractors. And I've seen this in the doula midwife space, where their personal biases and slants have them going outside a scope of practice. Doula's who are giving medical-based advice that is often slanted, either very pro or anti-hospital, and then sensationalizing the risk of each sector negatively and incorrectly. And it can put a lot of people off of doula-based services, or, you know, people who are chiropractors are going outside of scope, or they're putting individuals on lifelong maintenance plans. I've seen, you know, certain chiropractors have made people take out huge loans or second mortgages because they said that's the only way that their back pain is going to get better. When you have those people, it taints the profession, right? And so advocating as a pelvic physio, as somebody who's in the exercise space, as somebody who is in these obstetrical worlds and spaces, I think it's really important that we hold ourselves accountable to each other because when we drift like that, you are a reflection of your profession as well. Right. And so I see so many wonderful doulas and so many wonderful midwives and so many wonderful Kairos. I'm sure this, all this ruining your pelvic floor stuff is coming from pelvic PTs. Like I'm upset because it's looking bad on me, like as a pelvic PT as well, right? Like I don't want people to think that their fear and hypervigilance of their pelvic floor came from me. And I'm not perfect, and there's no way that I've gotten it right every single time. It's just that reflective practice and that understanding that you are also a reflection of the profession at which you hold yourself, um, especially if you're leveraging that credentialing in order to give you that appeal to authority, which is such an important piece of the puzzle often leveraged in social media marketing and messaging, um I it just becomes a really important part of the discussion. So this was kind of birth, pregnancy adjacent. Um, but just as a consumer, if you are a mother, a mother to be, somebody who wants to be pregnant, somebody who wants to be pregnant again, and your algorithm starts to come up with these things, I just think it's really important one that you understand what it is coming from and where it is coming from. The second piece, if you are a provider listening to this, I think it's important for us to find the middle ground. How do we get people's attention in a way that doesn't unfortunately or unintentionally cause harm? And third is how do we create a space where contextualized, nuanced, like long form-based information is our go-to standard. And honestly, maybe with all the deep fakes with AI and people getting so sick of the formulaic way that AI writes

Fix Your Feed And Choose Long Form

SPEAKER_00 26:10

that maybe that it will. It'll just not people will naturally gravitate away from it because if they say, it's not diastasis, it's separation, or like the way that you know AI writes. Um you can kind of sometimes catch it from a mile away. Um maybe it's just gonna make people feel really frustrated or take like that human element out of it. And you're gonna hear, you know, on podcast episodes, we we obviously filter the audio and stuff, but you hear my filler words and you hear my rambles, and I gotta always pull myself back and I have my outline, but my outline always creates drift because I am a yapper, and that's okay. But I think those authentic voices are really important. And then I'm gonna leave off with two kind of pieces of advice if you are working on becoming an influencer in the social media space. Number one, while I have a bigger account, I'm like 30 plus thousand followers, I am not a huge account, and it has taken me a really long time. Like I've been in this for 10 years, consistently posting, and it has taken me a long time, like a lot longer than most people to grow my audience. That being said, I have the very best followers, and I am thankful for them every single day. And if you are one of them, I am thankful for you because you all are so engaged. You ask incredible questions, you have really respectful dialogue and debate, and you don't always agree with me, and I love that too. And that is so important in our world of cheap interactions and you know, three-second attention spans. I feel so thankful. And it took me longer, and I could have more reach, of course. But that building of genuine authentic connection, I talk to so many of you on DMs, you get voice notes from me because it's hard to do nuance while texting, it takes just takes so long. Sometimes you hear my kids in the background because I want to answer you, but like we're off to soccer. That people connecting with people in an online landscape is something I'm I'm so thankful for. And so just it sometimes it is so much more than just the follower account, and it's how engaged people are with you and creating that community around you that makes me very rarely, I never get burnt out by my community. I get burnt out by other things that I see online and it just frustrates me. That is so important. I just think that's so great. If you are also, and I'm gonna do a whole podcast episode, I think, because I had a really great discussion with a provider about this. A lot of people are also really called to be in the birth space because they are kind of going through this transformative moment, right? Motherhood, pregnancy, being pregnant postpartum, having little kids, being a mother, going through menopause, like all these big like life events for women are so transformative to how they feel within their own body, their sense of self, their sense of identity shifts. And when you layer in things like pelvic floor dysfunction or diastasis recti, and how that has really changed self-esteem and again, identity, that can really call people to share that story online. It's also a very big reason why many pelvic PTs

Build Community Without Projection

SPEAKER_00 29:55

go into pelvic, right? Like they want to have kids or, you know, they're starting to see pregnant patients or then that they're pregnant. And one of the things that I think is really important, and again, I'm gonna do a whole podcast episode on this, is that we connect based on our stories, but we don't project how we feel within our own body onto them. And some of the messaging online truly is a projection of I wish somebody would have told me this, or I feel like this in my body, and so I need to warn you. The problem is that not everybody, even with your exact same baseline, like anatomy, your diagnosis, et cetera, is gonna feel the way that you do. And so when you're using that fear of like, I wish somebody would have told me this, or like this could be this, it's really important that we connect when we don't project. And that is where, you know, this story-based narrative is such a huge, again, driver on social media engagement and just something that we want to be leveraging or like thinking about how we're leveraging, I should say. So that's kind of my my two things is like really being careful that when we are talking about our experience, we're not making this assumption or this belief that everyone is gonna feel even the same diagnosis the same way that we do. All right. Let me know what your thoughts are. Um, I loved the discussion under that post. Um, more to come from me on this. I have a couple of research papers that I want to share with you all. They're gonna be on my Instagram page, and then I'm gonna deep dive into them either on Substack or on the podcast or both. Um, thank you all for 100,000 downloads, and we will talk to you all next time.