Pelvic Floor
Physiotherapy in Toronto and Newmarket

The physiotherapist will start by getting a detailed health history. This will include discussions around your bowel and bladder function, if you experience discomfort or pain with intercourse, your pregnancy, labour, and delivery history, what activities/exercises you enjoy, your sleep, diet, and water intake as well as your overall goals for treatment.

We will then provide education on pelvic floor physiotherapy, what and how we assess, what we look for and how we build a treatment plan from what we find.

Next we’ll assess your general movement patterns for your low back, hips, and pelvis. As well as check for core function.

Then, as long as you’ve provided informed consent, we’ll do the internal pelvic floor assessment. This may involve internal palpation of both the vagina and rectum, again, only with your consent.

Once we’re all done, we’ll discuss the findings and send you home with some exercises to get you moving forward towards reaching your goals!

Absolutely, yes! Truly every birthing person could benefit from pelvic floor physiotherapy. Think of it like getting a massage — you may not have a current “issue” going into treatment, but in our experience, everyone has something that can be worked on to make them stronger and more balanced. That said, the most common indications that you need a pelvic floor physio are incontinence (urinary or fecal), pain with intercourse, pelvic pressure and heaviness, and/or prolapse. It is advised that all pregnant mothers visit a pelvic floor physio during pregnancy before birth for labour preparation. We then recommend a first appointment roughly 6 weeks after delivery for an assessment and rehabilitation.

We do an internal treatment for both, however, we spend more time on the scar tissue and releasing connective tissue over the abdominal cavity with Caesarean sections. It’s major surgery and needs to be viewed as such. During the surgery, both the abdominal musculature and connective tissue are cut, which can cause extreme weakness and tension in both structures. This can create a lot of mechanical issues over time, such as lower back pain, pelvic dysfunction, hip pain, and more. The c-section scar itself may create tension and tightness, so we perform gentle scar tissue release and teach patients how to continue doing this at home. We also do core retraining to strengthen the integrity of the abdominal muscles after the surgery.

Absolutely not. Whether you had a baby a year ago, 20 years ago, or are just starting to try to get pregnant, it’s never too late to get started with pelvic floor physiotherapy.

No, you don’t have to. As pelvic health physiotherapists, this does not phase us nor does it affect our ability to carry out our treatment plan, we can still do internal treatment if needed. If you aren’t comfortable with the internal work while you have your period, that’s ok too. You should still come in. There are other ways we can still work on moving forward with your treatment plan.

This depends on what we find during our initial assessment and how your body responds to the treatment. Re-assessing the muscles to make sure we’re on the right track is an important part of the process.

If we don’t have your consent to proceed with the internal assessment, we won’t do it. We will educate you on the benefits of performing the internal assessment, risks of not performing the internal assessment, as well as the alternative options.

Depending on the sensitivity of your tissues, it’s possible that you may experience some discomfort – however we are trained on gentle treatment strategies to help make things as comfortable as possible. As always, we keep in constant communication to ensure your comfort.

The number of pelvic physiotherapy treatments will depend on the mama. Each treatment plan is individualized — similar to other physiotherapy treatments. Sometimes it’s just once a month, while in other cases it may be weekly, depending on the initial assessment and symptoms .

If you have any symptoms at all, we recommend you come in as soon as possible. Symptoms include pain with sex, getting up to pee more than 3 times per night, concern over your diastasis, or leaking at all when you’re not on the toilet.

If you have no symptoms, we recommend your first prenatal visit should be sometime between weeks 28-32, so that you can establish a baseline for where your pelvic floor is at, get treatment if there is something happening that you weren’t aware of until the assessment (this is very, very common), and get started with labour prep.

Generally, we recommend waiting about 6 weeks after your birth – no matter how you birthed your baby – to come in for your postnatal assessment. Don’t worry if it’s been longer than that though. We are happy to see you at any time, even if your children are grown and out of the house. It’s never too late to start.

Yes. The appointment is devoted to manual therapy and treatment, so we always send people home with some guidelines to follow or exercises that are specific to their situation, which may take just a few minutes per day to complete.

Believe it or not, kegels are not for everyone. A lot of people are doing kegels unnecessarily or improperly and they may be causing more harm than good. This is why it is so important to have a proper assessment by a pelvic floor therapist.

Not at all! We may ask you to make reasonable accommodations depending on your own situation, but we know that exercise and your favourite activities are important for yourphysical and mental health. Instead of writing off your favourite activities, we may work towards a modified goal while we get you to where you want to be.