Using Technology To Help You Master Your Pelvic Floor Muscles

Between back-to-back meetings, the subway commute, and trying to fit in a workout before your next Zoom call, you don’t have time to guess your way through physical therapy. If you’re a New Yorker who runs on data — sales targets, billable hours, quarterly metrics — you probably expect the same precision from your healthcare. So why should your pelvic floor be any different?

If you’ve ever struggled to locate or properly engage your pelvic floor muscles — whether the goal is strengthening or learning to relax them — you’re in good company. These are deep, internal muscles, and most people simply can’t tell whether they’re doing a “Kegel” correctly based on verbal cues alone. It’s a bit like being told to flex a muscle you can’t see and have never consciously controlled. That disconnect is exactly why biofeedback has become a cornerstone of specialized pelvic floor physical therapy.

What Biofeedback Actually Does

Biofeedback uses sensors — placed externally or internally, depending on your comfort and treatment plan — to measure the electrical activity of your pelvic floor muscles (in microvolts). That activity is translated in real time into a visual signal on a screen: a rising bar, a moving line, a graph you can actually watch respond to your own effort.

In other words, biofeedback takes a muscle group you can’t see and turns it into something you can track, adjust, and improve — the same way you’d monitor any other performance metric.

The research backs this up. A 2011 Cochrane systematic review of 24 trials involving 1,583 women found that those who received biofeedback alongside PFMT were significantly more likely to report their urinary incontinence was cured or improved compared to those who did PFMT alone (Herderschee et al., 2011). Other studies on biofeedback-assisted pelvic floor re-education have reported cure or improvement rates as high as 80%.

Why This Matters More Than “Just Do Your Kegels”

Here’s the problem with the generic advice to “do your Kegels”: most people are guessing. Some are engaging the wrong muscles entirely — bearing down instead of lifting, or gripping muscles that are already too tight. Done incorrectly, this can leave symptoms unchanged or even make them worse.

Biofeedback removes the guesswork. Instead of hoping you’re doing it right, you get objective, real-time confirmation of the exact contraction, relaxation, and coordination pattern your body needs — whether your goal is resolving incontinence, easing pelvic pain, or simply restoring core function after childbirth, surgery, or years of high-stress, high-sitting desk life.

The Bottom Line

You already trust data to drive results at work. Your pelvic floor deserves the same standard. Biofeedback gives us — and you — the objective measurement needed to move past “trying” and into actually mastering your core function.

Because in the office and in the clinic, what gets measured gets managed.