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Meet the pelvic floor – an underappreciated piece of core body apparatus.
The pelvic floor is a hammock of muscles and ligaments that sits across the bottom of the pelvis. It connects from the pubic bone at the front to the coccyx at the back.
Pelvic floor problems are common in all women, but especially athletes and active women. Pelvic floor issues are also synonymous with mums and midlife – with good reason – and it’s a topic in which we all need to know, say and do a lot more.
As many as one in two
If you can honestly, hand-on-heart say you have no pelvic floor issues then look to the nearest netballer to you. If you don’t, she does. The stats say one in every three women is suffering some kind of pelvic floor dysfunction but that’s the general figure – the likelihood increases to near one in two among active women.
And because netball is a high impact sport, we’d suggest the one in two ratio is also a conservative estimate.
Even so, one in two of 100,000 England Netball members means …
Well, we can all do the maths.
It takes, so says the literature, an average of seven years before a woman will confront her pelvic floor issues. So really it’s crucial we all school up, tool up and get talking.
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