Dyspareunia is the fancy word for pain with sexual intercourse. Most often this occurs in women, although it can still happen with men. Typically this pain occurs with vaginal penetration. The Vagician can help with all types of pain with intercourse, but for simplicity and commonality we will focus on pain with vaginal penetration.  

After any sort of trauma to this area, the pelvic floor muscles (PFM) typically want to protect you, so they will tighten up and go into a spastic state. This can lead to consistent pain that doesn’t have much of a rhyme or reason as to when or why it is occuring.  Pelvic floor therapists can help retrain the muscles to lengthen, relax, and decrease the spasms.

Most of us triathletes have a lot of slow twitch muscle fibers, but not as many fast twitch fibers. So when we have that pounding force on our pelvic floor, or that stress on our pelvic floor, our fast twitch fibers are not coordinating quickly enough to close off the urinary outlet (the urethral sphincter), leading to peeing our pants.

The pelvic floor muscles also help with bowel control. Sometimes when our muscles aren’t strong enough we will have fecal leakage or even constipation.

Urge Urinary Incontinence (UUI) is described as a sudden and often frequent, urgent sensation to have to use the bathroom. This may result in leakage suddenly and/or on the way to the restroom. One major reason this is happening is because the pelvic floor muscles may not be quite strong enough and not coordinating quickly enough, thus leading to urgency, frequency, and leakage.

Imagine you are sitting at the dinner table with your favorite celebrity and your tampon starts to slip out. So you subtly try to kind of suck the tampon back into your vagina.