This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Floored - Why Our Pelvic Floor Health Matters with Dr. Sara Reardon | 314

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

Let’s be honest: when it comes to pelvic floor health, most of us have been fed a steady diet of silence, shame, and “just deal with it.” But that ends today. In this episode, we welcome Dr. Sara Reardon, aka The Vagina Whisperer (yes, really), a board-certified pelvic floor physical therapist, TED speaker, and author of FLOORED: A Complete Guide to Women’s Pelvic Floor Health at Every Age and Stage. With nearly 20 years of experience, Sara is here to deliver straight talk and science-backed wisdom about what’s actually going on down there. Pelvic floor dysfunction is common—but it’s not normal. From postpartum issues to painful sex, pee leaks to prolapse, this is your permission slip to stop suffering in silence and start getting the care you deserve. No more brushing it off. No more white-knuckling your way through it. Just informed, empowered choices about your health and your body. In This Episode, We Cover: ✅ What your pelvic floor actually is and why it matters ✅ Signs it’s not functioning properly (and that you shouldn’t ignore) ✅ How to advocate for yourself in a healthcare system that often overlooks women ✅ Why pain, leakage, and shame are NOT normal parts of womanhood This isn’t just a health issue—it’s a confidence, autonomy, and quality of life issue. Understanding your body is woman’s work. Taking care of it unapologetically? Also woman’s work. Connect with Sara:  Website: https://thevagwhisperer.com/ Book: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/floored-sara-reardon?variant=43118704427042 FB: https://www.facebook.com/thevagwhisperer/ IG: https://www.instagram.com/the.vagina.whisperer/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2MllrS6zD974pxBFbVUHdA LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-reardon-pt-dpt-wcs-4a6b1025/ Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thevagwhisperer Related Podcast Episodes: Don’t Let Your Doctor Kill You: The New Hormone Solution with Dr. Erika Schwartz | 305 The Stress Paradox: Why We Need Stress (and How to Make It Work for Us) with Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist | 294 Endometriosis & Women's Health with Somer Baburek | 238 If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music Share the Love: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So, what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. I am Nicole Kalil, your This Is Woman's Work host, here to talk about something that holds a lot together, literally and figuratively, but somehow mostly gets left out of the conversation unless it's about bleeding, birthing, or being used for someone else's benefit, and that is our pelvic floor. Most of us weren't taught about it. We definitely weren't taught how to take care of it.

And when something starts to feel off, like we experience leaking, heaviness, pain during sex, or pressure, we're told it's just part of being a woman, part of aging, part of having babies. But I'm calling BS because pain is not something we should normalize. Leaking is not just a punchline, and peeing a little when you laugh, sneeze, or work out may make for hysterical conversations with your girlfriends, but doesn't have to be your new normal. Mostly, we've been misinformed and flat-out ignored when it comes to our pelvic health, and that stops now.

Because if you have a pelvic floor, and if you're listening to this, I'm guessing that you do, this conversation matters. Enter Dr. Sarah Reardon, better known as the Vagina Whisperer. Yes, that's her actual nickname. No, I don't think she made it up. And yes, she totally owns it. She's a board certified pelvic floor physical therapist, TED speaker, and the author of Floored, a complete guide to women's pelvic floor health at every age and stage. With nearly two decades of experience, she's on a mission to

help women understand their bodies, advocate for their care, and stop suffering in silence. So, Sarah, thank you for being here. And I'm hoping to start with the basic of basics. What even is the pelvic floor and what does it do? Thanks Nicole for having me. Your pelvic floor is a basket of muscles that sit at the base of your pelvis. So we all know that bony skeleton of pelvic bones we see on jammies or the anatomy medal at the doctor's office. And at the very bottom of that is a group of muscles called the pelvic floor muscles that sit

like a hammock. And they support the pelvic organs, including your uterus, which holds a growing baby, your ovaries, your rectum, which holds poo,, and your bladder which holds pee. These muscles also have three openings in the female body, one for urine, one for the anal opening where poop and gas exit, and then the vaginal opening for menstruation and childbirth and vaginal intercourse. So these muscles are super important. We're using them literally every moment of the day to help support our spine, to support our organs, to keep in urine and bowel movements until a convenient time. But again, to your point, we don't often even know they exist until a problem arises. And there's so much we need to do to take care of these muscles to prevent issues and

to overcome problems if we're experiencing them. Okay. So let's talk about some of those problems. What might be common pelvic floor problems that we might not even know that that's what they are? Does my question make sense? Like, yep. Okay. So some of the ones you mentioned even in the intro, so urinary leakage, that often means that that sphincter or urine exits that's in the muscle isn't strong enough or coordinated enough to prevent leaks when you cough, sneeze, run, jump, laugh.

Also even common bladder issues like overactive bladder where you feel like you have to pee every 30 minutes to an hour and you go and only a little bit comes out. Or you're waking multiple times at night to pee which can be disruptive to your sleep and make you fatigued. Or even a hard time starting your urine stream. You may sit down and feel like, gosh, I really have to strain or push to get it started.

That means your muscles aren't relaxing well. On other things like constipation, these muscles have to relax really well to empty your bowel movements and often they're tight or tense and your bowel movements feel like they're not complete or you have to strain or you're only going little bits at a time. Leakage of stool or staining in your underwear also can be a pelvic floor issue, along with common things like hemorrhoids or anal fissures. And then one of the other bigger ones is pain. So painful intercourse, painful orgasms, pain with tampon insertion,

speculum exams, painful periods, tailbone pain. You know, pain is really information from our body that something's not working well or the way it should. So we don't wanna ignore it. But if it's in this area of the body, it's often connected to your pelvic floor muscles, whether it's the original area of issue or say something like painful menstruation

can cause tension in the pelvic floor area that can cause other bowel or bladder or sexual pain issues. So again, anything pretty much from your ribs to your knees, if there's a problem going on there, like hip pain or back pain, pelvic organ prolapse, and all of that is connected to your pelvic floor. Okay, and I said in the intro, something along the lines of a lot of this

is being dismissed as, you know, well, you just had a baby or you're just getting older. What's your reaction to that sort of thought process? I mean, major eye roll. I think that, you know, it's really unfortunate because pelvic floor issues have been experienced by women since the dawn of time, right? We know that the three biggest life stages

that people develop pelvic floor dysfunction as women are pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause. And 100% of women will go through menopause. And everybody who gives birth, whether it's vaginal or C-section, will go through pregnancy and postpartum. So this is, we're literally keeping the population going yet we're not caring for women proactively or even after the fact when we know that pelvic floor issues could arise. So the narrative has been like, oh, this is just what happens after you have a baby or wait until you're done having kids and then we'll do surgery to fix it or pain with sex or vaginal dryness or leakage just happens with aging.

Well, yeah, these things can happen, but why aren't we helping women prevent these issues or treating them? I mean, there's more treatment for osteoporosis, diabetes, hypertension than pelvic floor issues, yet pelvic floor issues are more common than all of those things. And it's really unacceptable because it impacts our quality of life so much. And yet, we're just kind of living with these issues, avoiding things in our life, like exercise or socialization or sex even, and it really impacts our quality of life, and it's pretty unacceptable to me.

Yeah, I mean, it makes me feel kind of ragey. Totally ragey. Some of the other things related specifically to women's health, where it just feels so undervalued, so underserved, so under-talked about, so under-supported. I mean, it just, we are half of the population. It is infuriating to me. I'm going to put my rage to the side for a second and ask, what are some things that

we can and should be doing to care for our pelvic floor? This is such a great question, and it's really kind of why I wrote the book Floored, because I really went wide with it. I said, I can write a book about birth and the pelvic floor. I can write a book about menopause and the pelvic floor, but people don't even know what this muscle does, let alone every single life stage, how it's affected from your period to your monthly hormonal cycles, to having sex, to we mentioned pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, to pain and then menopause.

So literally from the time we become women to the time we die, your pelvic floor is changing. And there are some really simple things that we can do to just have, you know, minimize the risk of getting pelvic floor issues. So one of them is just daily stuff, like how you pee and how you poop. You know, I tell people when they're peeing, we are notorious for this as like working women and moms.

We're always trying to be efficient, but we push when we pee. And I tell people like, do not push when you pee. When you pee, you should sit down on the toilet. Don't hover unless it's like super gross, but sit down, lean forward, and just take some big deep breaths and don't push because when you push or strain on the toilet, it weakens your pelvic floor. And I've seen young women in their twenties who've never had kids and they have pelvic floor weakness and leakage and prolapse just because they strain when they pee because nobody's ever taught them how to do it properly. Or with menstruation, learning how to properly use a tampon, how to properly insert a menstrual

cup or a disc, finding the vaginal opening. And also looking at the vulva and vagina. The vagina is the inside canal, the vulva is the outside. Like teaching women about these parts of their body because if they don't know what their normal is, they don't know what their abnormal is. Say their labia are disappearing or they have redness or irritation in the area or something's kind of protruding or falling out. They don't know what to look for because they've never even kind of visualized it. like they don't know what to look for because they've never even kind of visualized it.

And then other things like constipation or how to poop properly. So I tell people, I take what's called magnesium citrate at night and then help soften your bowel movements. But none of us are getting enough hydration and enough daily exercise and enough grams of fiber. And often bowel movements can be hard.

And when you strain for bowel movements, it also weakens your pelvic floor. So I tell everybody to get one of those little squatty potties or stool under their feet. And when you poop, you can push, but you need to exhale. So you don't want to hold your breath or strain. You want to exhale like you're blowing out a bunch of birthday candles, and that can help as well.

And then when you're exercising, so the third thing is when you're exercising at the gym or in the workout, like pull your pelvic floor in, like activate your pelvic floor when you're exercising, so the third thing is when you're exercising at the gym or in the workout, like pull your pelvic floor in, like activate your pelvic floor when you're exercising so you get that pelvic floor workout and then things you're already doing throughout your day. Yeah, I was going to ask that. Since it's a group of muscles, I would imagine there are things that we can do to strengthen like we do all of our other muscles.

So aligning that with our other workouts makes sense to me. Totally. You know, it's a muscle that contracts, but it also needs to relax completely. I think one of the other narratives about the pelvic floor is that we only think of the vagina, where that's really one part of the pelvic floor. When we think about the vagina, we've always been told,

do your Kegels and tighten your vagina and pull your core in, because that's going to give you great sex or really awesome orgasms or a strong core. But these muscles need to relax just like they need to contract. So often I see people like just tightening all the time or a lot of these exercise programs or you know,

Kegel exercises, exercisers that people use can tell people to just tighten their vaginas but you need that muscle to relax and contract. So when you do a Kegel contraction or contract within a workout or just by itself, you need to relax it fully as well. And then also some people don't need to strengthen at all. Some people have tension and they really need relaxation

and yoga and breathing. And so Kegels are the wrong thing. So you have to kind of figure out which avenue you need to walk down. And I go over kind of how to do this in the book. There's a checklist of things you can look at to say like, do we need to work on strengthening or do you need to work on relaxation and then kind of a menu of exercises to do to help that those issues.

Okay, you mentioned pooping. My mom actually got me one of those squatty potties. Yeah, exactly. And I like rolled my eyes at her, but of course listened because my mom always is ahead of the curve with these types of things. But my question is, is once a day normal or is it after every time you eat? I've heard different things. What do we want when it comes to regular bowel movement?

The normal range is between three times a day to three times a week. Pretty much you can be going every other day or you can be going three times a day. Anything outside of that range, if you're going more than three times a day, you're going too frequently and you might have something that's loosening your stool, something like that, or you're not emptying well when you actually do go. And if it's less frequent than every other day, then you're not going off in enough. And that's typically what we see more is the constipation lingering on for two or three or four days.

And people don't always connect like, well, how is that even related to your pelvic floor? Well, when you have really hard bowel movements, like you're trying to like shit a baseball out of your butt, you're straining, right? You're straining and you're bearing down. You can even tear sometimes and have a little bit of blood. And that straining weakens your pelvic floor. And you do that two or three times a week, and that is repetitive weakness and pressure on your pelvic floor.

And that's what we really want to try to prevent. So again, this is where you want to look into some things that could help, whether it's movement, nutrition, hydration, stool softeners, or again, I use something called magnesium citrate that has a natural kind of softening effect to the stool. But it's important, that's why this kind of pooping thing's

so important, and I talk about it. And what we see is a lot of kids have constipation. If you have these issues when you're younger, you start to see them trickle into adulthood because you've never learned the right ways to manage it. The other thing is you're really full of stool in your pelvis, it puts pressure on your bladder. When you're constipated, you're going to find that you have to go to the bathroom more, that you leak more often. And so you can see this kind of trickle effect about how if one of those systems hit off,

it really affects the whole pelvic health system. Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa? As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale expertise and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. You said earlier when you were talking about looking at our vulva and our vagina, that when we look,

then we notice when something is abnormal. I would imagine the same is true with our poop and all the other things. Like probably everybody listening in, I've had everything from diarrhea to constipation. And a lot of times it just tells me something about what's going on in my world, whether it be what I'm eating or not eating or drinking enough or not drinking enough or drinking too much alcohol or being really healthy or all the things. I guess what would you say to the person who feels really uncomfortable with the idea of looking at all of these things that we've somewhere along the way been taught are embarrassing

or gross or whatever? I mean, wild to me because it is literally something that we all do. But what are your thoughts on that? Totally normal. I mean, that's totally normal to feel like it's a big ask and I know it's a big ask. And often in my clinic, when women come in and I ask them, I'm like, hey, do you want to see what I'm doing? So they can actually see like, how is Sarah in her pelvic floor assessment, inserting her finger into my vaginal opening and pressing on the sidewalls, how is that connected to pain with sex or leakage or tightness from my C-section scar? So I think it's totally normal. And I don't think you have to jump from not knowing

your body to this in-depth exploration. You don't have to invite other people to look at your poop. I mean, take it in stages, right? Well, and you know, I think that like if you look at your pee, say for example, if it's really cloudy or dark or odorous, like that's probably a sign you either have an infection or you're not hydrating enough. Sometimes the first pee in the morning is a little bit more concentrated, but after that it should be almost clear. Same thing with your poop.

I mean, you kind of know if it's like hard balls, you're like, I'm constipated. If it's super runny, you're like, okay, something's upsetting my stomach, right? One of my poop hacks actually is to eat a piece of corn on the cob and follow how many days it takes from the day you eat the corn to the day the corn is in your poop in the toilet. And that shows you how long it takes for poop to get through your body. And anything longer than, again, those two days is too long, which means your system's working really slowly. So check your corn poop. But then for your evolving vagina,

I'm like, start slow, just like look at the external. You don't have to open the lips and kind of explore. It's like, can you see your mons pubic, which is the area with the hair? Can you see the external labia, the labia major, which has the hair? If you kind of just wanna feel it in the shower, kind of just rinse the area with the water in your hand and see if you can feel it. You can take it really slow. You may not even know what you're looking

at. I do have a diagram in the book that kind of shows you the vulva and the vagina and the clitoris and the muscles that are behind there. So I think work at your pace, but I do think it's an option for folks who want to see kind of what is going on. And it can help you if you don't know how to, you know, where to put a dildo or a tampon or whatever. It's like, you got to know where the hole is, right? And so I think it just helps you kind of see what's going on in this part of your body.

So you mentioned a lot of things, but if we don't pay attention or we don't address some of these pelvic floor problems as we notice them, what happens? How do they evolve if left untreated? I mean, like most types of muscle pain or dysfunction, they don't typically get better on their own. So I think that maybe with postpartum, when sometimes there can be a little bit of leakage or some weakness right away after birth, there's a chance that could get better at three months or a year. But for the postpartum period, I typically tell people if you're experiencing something at

12 weeks postpartum, leakage, pain with sex, back pain, hip pain, core weakness, prolapse, like, that's your signal to go in and get it treated or start doing something because the research is very clear. If you experience something at three months postpartum, you're likely to experience it at one year postpartum as well. So it's not gonna get better. And then you're gonna say,

why did I wait nine months to get this fixed, right? What also happens is it starts to become chronic in nature. So say you have pain with sex. What happens when you have pain is you want to kind of, you guard up or tense your muscles when you're anticipating pain. So now you're developing muscle tension in response to that. And then your nervous system starts to get upregulated

because you know it's gonna hurt and then you don't wanna have sex at all. And it kind of starts evolving into this cascade of tension and anxiety and then sometimes just avoidance. And then outside of that, I would say muscles get weaker with time, unfortunately. We lose a little bit of muscle mass every year that we age, which is why we have to search strength training. I see on Instagram or social media all these workouts that we need to do. And I'm like, why isn't anybody talking about the pelvic floor workouts we need to do?

Because your hormones decline, your estrogen declines, your connective tissue declines. So we need to actively kind of build that up. I say perimenopause is as much of a roller coaster as it is, it's a little bit of a yellow light. Like, hey, caution, your body's going through changes. So you have an opportunity now instead of waiting until the light's red and everything stops, over these next five to 10 years, start building your muscle mass, start using a vulvar moisturizer, start strengthening and kind of being aware of your body and make some

of these changes so that when you hit menopause and your hormones are kind of in the in the dumpster, for lack of better terminology, you've done the work to make this like to ease this transition. Okay, so one of the things that I've noticed and please challenge me if you feel I'm off base, but I've sort of made up this story that we are not doing enough medically and with research and for women's health in general. I feel so far behind. And yet I see the capitalism and products and things that there are,

it almost seems like they're ahead of the things that really matter. So we're seeing things like vaginal deodorant or all those types of things. What are your thoughts on products like that? Are they helpful? Are they leading the charge? Are they exploitive? Like something in the middle?

We're a little bit of everything. It's so funny because the first chapter of the book talks about it. I call it the big business of vaginas. You know, we're kind of, vaginas were kind of in the dark and they were not talked about and they were embarrassing and often thought of as like smelly or dirty. And like now we're bringing them into the spotlight, which you think would be really positive. But what we're doing is with all these wellness products of just like,

you know, sense and, you know, vibrating muscle stimulators or libido gummies or deodorants or whatever, you know, jade eggs and steaming, it's a little bit half snake oil and half like trying to put like fancy chandeliers in a house that doesn't have walls. Right. So we're focused on wellness, but that's not true health. And wellness makes us like maybe feel good momentarily. Short term relief. It's something that makes us feel good in the very short term, but it's not true function. And I'm literally focused on like, how do these muscles function? And to, to really work on that in health, it's not just your vagina, it's not just your volva, it's your pelvic floor. Your pelvic floor is the functional part of this body that helps with

bowel movements and sex and birth and lifting and breathing. And we're not talking about that. We're talking about the things that are easy, the low-hanging fruit we feel like we can do to like zhuzh up our vages when you kind of need to start with the basics sometimes. So that's really the goal of this book. Do these things have a place? Some of them. Some of them are like totally bogus and a waste of your money and time. Some of them, like some of the vaginal moisturizers I think are helpful. You know, we do need those options, especially people who don't want to take hormones. Some of there's like a red light therapy you can do that can be kind of a little bit of a boost for people.

But a lot of the other stuff is pretty crappy, to be honest with you. This may be a repeat of what you've already said. But if we want to get down to the basics, I should have said get back to the basics. But for some of us, the basics were never given to us as a foundation in the first place. So, I guess, two-part question. When should we start educating people about their, or women about their pelvic floors?

And then what are, again, if it's repeat, some of the basics that we should be focusing on before we even think about the products and the stuff and the chandeliers. Right. You know, it's a trickle of fact. It's not like, hey, when you're 13, you got to learn this. And then when you're 25, you got to learn this.

It's really a trickle that I think one of the best things we are doing as a generation, I'm in my 40s, is we are educating ourselves so that we can educate the next generation. I have two sons. And one of my girlfriends recently, we were at a parade in New Orleans, and her daughter was like, oh, you only have sons. And I said, yeah, I've got two boys. And she was like, that's a missed opportunity

for a daughter, because I can educate her about her body. I said, but I'm educating two sons about a woman's body. They're going to know what a real body looks like, what breasts look like after you have kids and what a tummy looks like. They know what a tampon is and they're like, what's that string hanging out of your butt, mom? They're like, the vagina looks like a butt, but it's in the front. I'm like, well, thanks. But it's a trickle effect where I think it really starts by naming our parts. I don't use kid names like Cookie or Cha Cha for our genitals.

I do call them private parts, but I educate kids like, hey, this is what they are. This is when you can pull them out. This is when you keep them in. You know, this is what they do. Start really educating on the function and then answer their questions. Instead of saying like, oh, you're too young to ask about like, what is that? You know, like, or why do you have blood every month, mommy? Well, when mommy doesn't have a baby in her tummy, she gets what's called a period, you know, and the period happens because I'm shedding the lining of my uterus. If they ask more questions,

you follow up. But sometimes they're just like, okay, and then they move on. Right. So I think we want to trickle in the details that are age appropriate. And then I think menstruation is probably the first big landmark when we start to really educate young women because they may get a little bit of period education, maybe a little bit of sex,

but they certainly don't learn about their pelvic floor. And over 40% of female athletes, high school and college, who have never had kids leak urine. So this is happening well before you even have kids. And yet they're ashamed, they're embarrassed. They're wearing dark underwear, dark cheerleading skirts, dark yoga pants because they don't know where to go to get help. Women don't know how to insert tampons.

They don't know that pelvic exams shouldn't be painful. They don't know that sex shouldn't be painful. They don't know that sex shouldn't be painful. So I think starting to trickle in these tidbits from periods to sexual health, all along those like teen years and twenties is when a lot of it needs to happen. And then of course we need to proactively work with women during pregnancy and postpartum. Okay. Couldn't agree more. And I don't know if this is true with the pelvic floor. I had a guest a while back and we were talking about, I think, menopause and she said it was covered in one day during medical school. And I think a lot of us, rightly so, think we should be able to go to our gynecologist

or doctors and ask these questions and talk about it. What do we do if we go to, and I put in air quotes, the expert and do they say this is normal or it's just because you're getting older or it's just because you had a baby or what have you and it doesn't sit right with us. Outside of reading your book, which is obviously phenomenal resource,

what other recommendations would you have? You know, it's a great question. And unfortunately, I would almost say anticipate that it will be dismissed, anticipate that they'll say you're fine, it'll get better, deal with it later. I would find a different provider. You know, I think that that's why social media and online groups have really become as much as there's a dark side, there's also a positive because it gives you information that you didn't even know was available. If you're experiencing anything in the pelvic health arena,

again, peeing, pooping, sex, pain, prolapse, I would go see a pelvic floor physical therapist. You can access a pelvic floor physical therapist in every single state in the United States without a referral from a physician. You can just walk right in like you're going to the chiropractor or the acupuncturist, which is important because they'll tell you,

oh, your pelvic floor is an issue or actually you're doing great. It's like going to the dentist, like, oh, things are looking good or yeah, you got a little something going on here, we're gonna need to kind of tune it up. So I would go there. And then a gynecologist is a vagina doctor, right?

There's a urologist who's a bladder doctor. There's a urogynecologist who's a surgeon for female reproduction and bladder issues, you know, a GI doctor, Nicola rectilagin. So I would go to like explore different physicians, but I would also go to a pelvic floor therapist to get help. And you know, the thing is, is that it's unfortunately, not easy to access therapists sometimes, sometimes there's long wait lists, sometimes they don't take

insurance and set a pocket. And that's because insurance reimbursements are so crappy, that we would only be able to see you for 15 minutes. Right. So I think that I would definitely just kind of keep pushing to explore options, but it's out there and you can get it in person, you can get it virtually, you can get it in a book, you can get it in an online program, but it's out there. And I would imagine you share a lot via your Instagram

and website as well. So let me just remind people or let people know that they can find you at the vagina whisperer on Instagram. The website is the vag whisperer.com where you can also find her book floored, which is coming out in the next couple days here. Sarah, thank you so much is such an important conversation. And as you were talking, I still recognize how much I don't know about my own body. And it's frustrating, but also kind of exciting, like, gosh, there's so much more to learn. And I so appreciate that you're out there doing this work on all of our behalf.

So thank you. Thank you. And you know, I think that that's people asked, how did I come up with the title floor? And I said, you know, I really think that when people read this book and learn about their bodies, they're going to be like, oh, wow, I had no idea. And that's, you know, really, if they walk away from it, just kind of having having understood their own bodies, and I'm like, this is success. Yeah. Okay, we're going to put all the ways to find and follow Sarah and a link to her book in show notes, along with other related episodes, if you want to dive deeper into women's health topics like this one.

And let me close us out by saying this. Here's what I hope you walk away with after this episode. We deserve to understand our body. Every part of it, not just the parts that are visible or palatable or convenient for other people. Your pelvic floor plays a critical role in your strength, your health, your sex life, and is not something to be ignored, dismissed,

or quietly tolerated when it's not functioning as it should. We've been led to believe that suffering is just part of being a woman, that pain is the price we pay, that silence is strength. But what if, I mean, what if we started asking questions, speaking up, and actually taking care of ourselves and each other without guilt, shame, or apology? I don't know about you, but that sounds like woman's work to me.