When I trained with Pilates Elder Ron Fletcher he repeatedly quoted one of his mentors who, when encouraging someone to engage their pelvic floor, would say: “And So to Up.”

In pilates when we refer to the pelvic floor we are referring to what most people know as kegels. And when engaged, the direction that your kegels should go is up. Picture your pelvic floor muscles like a sheet lying on the floor. When you engage them they should lift up as if you lifted that sheet off the floor from the center. And so to up.

It’s important to work the pelvic floor because we often take those muscles for granted, but they are the muscles that in enable us to control our bowels and our bladder. And when you consider that they are the muscles at the very bottom of your pelvis, you realize that the weight of everything inside of our trunks ultimately presses down on these muscles.

Both men and women have kegel/pelvic floor muscles. It’s not just one muscle we are pulling up on, but multiple. In the picture above the group of levator-ani muscles and the coccygeus are the muscles of the pelvic floor.

Anyone up for a couple of kegels? You can do them right now and no one will be the wiser.