If your pants are leaving a mark on your skin, they are TOO TIGHT! It turns out that our fashion choices can indeed affect our pelvic health
By Cheryl Coppa
High-waisted pants hide away our most unflattering parts. Is it a problem? Yes. Is there something you can do without ditching this style? YES!
Tight pants, especially when tight in the midsection, are actually very detrimental to the core and the pelvic floor. Let me give you a couple of images to help you understand. This is a concept I teach in ALL my fitness training and focus very hard on it with learning and understanding better ways to move and support your body in our Core & Pelvic Floor Restore program.
Think of your core as a canister. It starts with the Diaphram and ends with the Pelvic Floor. You have all your organs and core muscles right in the middle, and your spine of course.
Now imagine this canister being tight in the middle. For a visual, look at this can:
A couple of major things happen here:
1) This interrupts your natural breathing pattern. This will lead you to a shallow breathing pattern which means you are breathing into your chest rather than your abdominal cavity. The air can’t go down in the abdominal cavity with the extra restriction there.
On your inhale, your shoulders should stay down and your belly and ribs should expand. If there is restriction and your natural breathing pattern has been lost, you will notice when you inhale your belly goes in and your shoulders go up. This is a shallow breathing pattern and it promotes anxiety as it triggers your flight or fight response. Learning to restore your breathing pattern is a good idea and ditching the tight pants will help.
2) We are creating pressure in the middle so this means that pressure has to go somewhere. Pressure will always follow the path of least resistance and in this case, especially for women over 40, it will most likely be the lower abs and the pelvic floor, pushing on these areas that will contribute to belly bulging and pelvic floor dysfunctions like leaking, prolapse, lower back pain, painful sex and pelvic pain. It’s an easy fix! Just get a bigger size! If your pants are leaving a mark on your skin, they are TOO TIGHT!
Support and tight are two different things, you can still have support without being too tight. Waist trainers are definitely not a good idea for pelvic floor health. Let me give you a look at some of my pants that I wear on a regular day or in my workouts. They are plenty loose around the waist even when they are high-rise. You should be able to easily slip your fingers in and out of the waistband and again it leaves no mark around your midsection.
You are not defined by the size of your pants, so give yourself some breathing room, literally. You will feel and even look better.
About Cheryl Coppa
✔️ A certified Core Confidence Specialist (Core and Pelvic Floor retraining)
✔️ A certified Personal Trainer specializing in women's fitness over 40
✔️ Low-Pressure Fitness / Hypopressive certified by creator Dr. Tamara Rial
✔️ Pre/postnatal corrective exercise specialist
✔️Instructor of the Pelvic Floor Health program, Ola Ka Ola
✔️ 40 years young, wife & mother of 3