Announcing: Down Training With kGoal
September 03, 2024
Kegel (i.e. strengthening) exercises are probably the most well-known part of pelvic floor fitness. However, they’re definitely not the whole story.
For both men and women, it is quite common for the pelvic floor to become too tense or too tight (this is sometimes called having overactive, high-tone, or hypertonic pelvic floor muscles). When it happens, this can cause a number of problems, including pelvic and lower back pain, bladder control and continence difficulties, painful sex, and other issues.
Perversely, an overactive pelvic floor can even be CAUSED by (overdoing it with) Kegels / strengthening exercises – as with any other muscle in your body, it’s important to work on muscle flexibility, and not just strength. In keeping with this, even for people who don’t have problems with an overactive pelvic floor, including both strengthening and relaxation (i.e. Down Training) exercises in your training regimen is the best way to maintain a healthy and functional pelvic floor.
All that is to explain why we are extremely proud to announce that kGoal is the first company to ever offer biofeedback-based Down Training with a non-insertable exerciser. Read on for more information.
Down Training Background
We wrote an article that you can read here devoted to a generalized overview of Down Training and how to relax your pelvic floor, but to save you the click, we’ll provide a quick summary below.
Q. What is Down Training?
A. Down Training is a category of pelvic floor exercise that’s intended to improve one’s ability to relax the pelvic floor muscles and to improve pelvic floor muscle flexibility.
Q. Why would I want to do Down Training?
A. When the pelvic floor muscles are too tight (although they can still be weak in this scenario), it can reduce their ability to function correctly. A lack of pelvic floor muscle flexibility or range of motion can cause significant pelvic and lower back pain, undermine proper bladder control and continence, cause pain with sex, or have other unpleasant consequences. In this scenario, Down Training can help improve pelvic floor muscle flexibility and range of motion and reduce the amount of baseline tension in the muscles, improving function.
Separately, Down Training is an important part of a healthy, well-rounded pelvic floor exercise regimen even for people who don’t have issues with an overactive pelvic floor. Just as with other muscles in your body, it is important to both (1) work on strengthening and also (2) cultivate muscle flexibility. Any muscle should be able to both activate and fully relax when it’s not supposed to be activated in order to do its jobs well.
Q. What can cause a pelvic floor to be overactive?
A. There are a few factors that can contribute. These can include:
- Musculoskeletal injuries (especially relating to your hips, pelvis and core)
- Urological and urogynecological dysfunctions such as endometriosis, pelvic inflammatory disease, some STDs, interstitial cystitis or prostatitis
- Rectal or gastrological dysfunctions like irritable bowel syndrome, hemorrhoids and ulcerative colitis
- Over-exercise (including, in particular, overdoing it with Kegel exercise)
However, many people develop an overactive pelvic floor for no apparent reason / without any of the above elevated risk factors.
Q. What are some ways to relax an overactive pelvic floor?
A. The most effective (and most relevant for this article) approach is biofeedback-based Down Training exercise. We’ll dig into how kGoal’s trainers can now support that type of exercise in a minute. But stretching and posture changes can also be helpful – you can read more at the article we linked above if you’re so inclined.
kGoal + Down Training
We recently added three new workouts to the app for our Boost sit-on-top pelvic floor trainer that all include Down Training.
- Diaphragmatic Breathing
- Mindful Meditation
- Elevator Ride
We’ll take a quick look at each of them in turn.
Diaphragmatic Breathing
This workout will instruct you about proper diaphragmatic breathing technique and provide biofeedback to help you see the impact of that style of breathing on your pelvic floor muscle state. Diaphragmatic breathing can help promote strength, flexibility and relaxation of your pelvic floor muscles, as well as helping you build awareness of the muscles.
Mindful Meditation
This workout comes at Down Training from the perspective of mindfulness practice, and guides you through a mindful meditation-style check-in with various parts of your body, featuring but not limited to your pelvic floor. Again, the biofeedback provided by Boost helps you connect with your pelvic floor muscles and connect the response of your muscles to various sensations and commands provided by your brain in a very visceral way.
Elevator Ride
Unlike the Breathing and Mindfulness workouts, which are purely focused on Down Training, Elevator Ride is a Combined Training workout that involves both relaxation of your pelvic floor muscles and also periods of muscle activation.
The concept is that you can raise or lower the biofeedback level shown by the app by activating or relaxing your pelvic floor muscles, and the goal is to move the biofeedback level up or down to track the movement of the elevator. The 5-minute workout starts by encouraging you to follow the elevator up and back down to the ground floor a few times, to check whether you are fully relaxing your muscles after you activate them. From there it also encourages you to see whether you are able to follow the elevator towards the ‘basement’ by relaxing your pelvic floor muscles even further than your initial baseline relaxed state.
kGoal Classic or just Boost?
We have had some customers ask whether these Down Training workouts are also available for our kGoal Classic product (which uses an intravaginal trainer for pelvic floor exercise) or just for Boost (which uses an external / sit-on-top design that does not involve insertion into the body).
All 3 of these workouts are available for kGoal Classic users, but we do not think of kGoal Classic universally as a Down Training tool. That is because people with an overactive pelvic floor are at higher risk of experiencing discomfort or pain with vaginal insertion – we want to avoid any possibility of someone choosing kGoal Classic because they want to use it for Down Training and then experiencing discomfort with usage. For users who are unable or prefer not to use an intravaginal trainer such as kGoal Classic, our Boost product is a better choice (regardless of whether you're a man or a woman).
For existing kGoal Classic users who know the product works well for them, however, we’d definitely encourage you to add the Down Training workouts into your routine – they’re a great complement to strengthening / Kegel exercises.
Talking with a pelvic floor physical therapist is always a great idea if you’re unsure whether kGoal Classic or Boost might be suitable for you, or more generally if you have any questions or challenges relating to your pelvic floor health.
Conclusion
Based on the feedback we’ve received from both users and clinicians already, we are very excited about being able to offer these new Down Training workouts. Pelvic floor health and fitness is much more than just Kegels / strengthening, and we’re proud to be able to support a broader palate of exercise types, while still doing it via a biofeedback-based approach that makes the experience fun and engaging. And we’re excited to continue developing and adding new Down Training workouts to the app over time, so keep your eyes peeled for updates in the future!
