You do not need to have had children to experience pelvic floor problems

There is a story most of us have been told about the pelvic floor. It goes something like this: we have a baby and then the pelvic floor is done. Game over. No more trampoline, coughing or sneezing again without wetting ourselves. Right?

“I can’t jump on trampolines anymore; I wet myself,” Kate Winslet said on The Graham Norton Show in 2016. “It’s bloody awful... When you’ve had a few children, you know, it’s just what happens.”

When you’ve had a few children, you know, it’s just what happens.”

Pregnancy and childbirth are hard on the body, and if you have been through those things, you might find yourself dealing with leaking, heaviness, or a sense that something is not working the way it should.

But it is not the whole story.

The pelvic floor is a group of muscles at the base of the pelvis. It supports the bladder, bowel and uterus, maintains continence, contributes to core stability and responds to every breath you take and every movement you make. It is not a static structure. It is dynamic, constantly adapting to the demands being placed upon it.

A healthy pelvic floor is responsive, elastic and well-coordinated. It lengthens and contracts automatically, without you having to think about it. It works with your breath, your diaphragm, your deep abdominals and your glutes as part of an integrated system.

When any part of that system is under pressure, the pelvic floor feels it. And there are many things that put that system under pressure, not just pregnancy.

What happens during perimenopause and menopause

Much of what I am sharing here was reinforced during the first round of The Release and Reconnect Method, when I was joined by two guest experts: Vanessa, a Women's Health Physiotherapist with 25 years of clinical experience, and Becca, a Women's Health Practitioner and Nutrition Coach.

Vanessa brought a deep grounding in the physiology of what actually happens to the pelvic floor across a woman's life, and a lot of what follows in this section comes from her expertise.

From around the age of 35, and accelerating significantly during perimenopause, oestrogen begins to decline. Oestrogen is not simply a reproductive hormone. It plays a central role in the health of muscle tissue, connective tissue, the bladder wall, and the nervous system. As it drops, the muscles of the pelvic floor, like all other muscles in the body, can lose tone, elasticity and responsiveness.

This is the same process that contributes to changes in skin, joint health and bone density. The pelvic floor is not exempt from it.

The bladder itself can also become more sensitive as oestrogen levels fall, which is why urgency and frequency often increase during this life stage, even in women who have never had any pelvic floor symptoms before. The signals between the bladder and the brain can become less reliable, creating that sudden, overwhelming sense of needing to go that arrives out of nowhere and is almost impossible to ignore.

Alongside this, Vanessa explained that muscle mass naturally reduces from around the age of 30 onwards. Without regular movement that challenges the pelvic floor specifically, this loss compounds over time. Many women notice a gradual change in how much control they have, a slowly narrowing margin between urgency and action, or a sense of heaviness they did not have before. Because these changes happen slowly, they are easy to attribute to simply getting older and accept as inevitable.

They are not inevitable. They are common, but those are not the same thing.

They are not inevitable. They are common, but those are not the same thing.

The role of stress, tension and gripping

This is where Becca's perspective added another layer.

Becca works with women on the relationship between nutrition, hormones and the nervous system, and one of the things she spoke about in our session was how chronic stress keeps the body in a low-level state of alert. When the nervous system is consistently activated, cortisol rises, digestion is deprioritised, and the muscles of the body tend to grip and brace without us consciously choosing to do so.

Most of us have experienced this in the shoulders and the jaw. Fewer of us think about it in relation to the pelvic floor, but the same pattern applies.

When stress levels are persistently high, the body prioritises survival above everything else. Muscles that should be working dynamically and responsively can instead become chronically held. The pelvic floor, which is highly sensitive to the state of the nervous system, is one of the first places this shows up.

A pelvic floor that is too tight, overworked and unable to fully release is just as likely to cause symptoms as one that is weak. Urgency, leaking, a sense of heaviness, pelvic pain and difficulty fully emptying the bladder can all result from a pelvic floor that is gripping rather than functioning. And no amount of squeezing or strengthening will help a muscle that is already overworked.

no amount of squeezing or strengthening will help a muscle that is already overworked.

Many women in this situation have tried pelvic floor exercises faithfully and felt no improvement, or even felt worse. This is not failure. This is what happens when the right tool is applied to the wrong problem.

There is also a less obvious pattern worth naming, and one that both Vanessa and Becca touched on in different ways. A lot of women grip through the bottom, the inner thighs and the abdomen habitually, without ever registering that they are doing it. Standing in a queue. Sitting at a desk. Dealing with a difficult email. The muscles are braced, the breath is shallow, and the pelvic floor is holding tension it was never designed to hold continuously. Becca made the point that the body is constantly gathering information about its environment, and chronic under-fuelling, poor sleep and persistent stress all send the same signal: stay alert, stay braced, do not let go.

The jaw connection

There is one more piece of this picture that tends to surprise people.

The jaw and the pelvic floor are connected through shared fascia, the nervous system, and breathing mechanics. When the jaw is chronically tense, which is extremely common in women who carry a high mental load or deal with ongoing stress, the breath becomes more restricted, the nervous system stays on alert, and the tension travels. The pelvic floor, as one of the most stress-sensitive structures in the body, often holds some of that tension too.

This is a pattern I have seen in the women I work with, regardless of whether they have had children. The ones dealing with urgency, heaviness or leaking are very often also clenching their jaw without realising it. Addressing both together, rather than treating each in isolation, is where the real change tends to happen.

What this means for you

If you have been living with pelvic floor symptoms and have quietly assumed they are not really relevant to you because you have not been through pregnancy, I would gently invite you to reconsider.

Perimenopause, menopause, chronic stress, sedentary habits and long-held tension patterns are all capable of creating pelvic floor dysfunction without a single contraction during labour ever having taken place. And if you have been dealing with symptoms for years without real improvement, it may simply be that the approach has not matched the actual cause.

This is not something to manage indefinitely. It is something to address, with the right understanding of what is actually happening in your body.

If you would like to start that process, I have put together a short free video called The Face and Body Reset, which includes a guided check-in across six key areas where tension tends to build, including the jaw, and one of the most effective release exercises from my programme. It takes a couple of minutes and requires nothing except a willingness to notice.

[Watch The Face and Body Reset, free]

The second round of The Release and Reconnect Method launches in September 2026, combining pelvic floor health and jaw tension release through Pilates, Face Yoga and breathwork. If this resonates, you can register your interest below and hear from me first when booking opens.

[Register your interest in The Release and Reconnect Method™]