Core and Pelvic Floor: The Ultimate Place of Connection

Though I love exercise (as in genuinely enjoy it, not just suffer through and feel happy once I’m done), I don’t talk about it much here or anywhere else. I learned early on, and especially on late 2000’s Facebook that no one really cares. My dad taught me to lift weights when I was about 10 or 11 because I was mowing the lawn too slowly. I’ve enjoyed and been pretty good at it ever since. I’ve tried powerlifting and MovNat and triathlons. This summer I’m training for a 7 mile run in my home town. I like almost all forms of movement except swimming for exercise rather than fun (I like to breathe when I want) and pilates.

However, even before I had children I struggled with pelvic floor dysfunction, particularly pain where the tailbone meets the pelvis and urine leakage when lifting heavy. After having children, both became worse until I pretty much had to stop deadlifting and would have bad pelvic pain if I hit a bump on the walking path in our yard. Not being able to deadlift may not sound like that big of a deal, but another name for deadlift is “pick s*** up off the floor”, so it’s pretty limiting.

Enter Lauren and her Restore Your Core program. Honestly, I’ll be eternally grateful to her and this program. Within a week, I was doing jumping jacks and jump rope (and coughing) without urine leakage. Within two, I was deadlifting again.

I had done pelvic floor physical therapy after the birth of both of my children, but it wasn’t particularly effective for me. It strengthened the glutes and lateral hips, but it didn’t change the movement patterns of the reflexive core. Lauren’s approach sees all the connections to the pelvis from the feet, the jaw, and the nervous system. I wanted to talk to her about how she learned these connections exist and what changes once you understand the connections.

A few highlights:

Pressure and volume doesn’t just stay in your rib cage, and it doesn’t just stay in your lungs. It moves through that whole core canister. Your pelvic floor gets the result of it. Your ribs get the result of it. Your core gets the result of it. So there’s this interplay. There’s this constant pressure management system. That is the core, the pelvic floor, the breathing, the spine.

Well, I think that we live in a culture that really prizes fit over function…So I think that like holding your belly in tight all of the time is definitely a problem it’s going to help you look like you have a flat belly for sure but that amount of tension is going somewhere so if you go back to that squish toy if I were just to kind of squeeze the middle then all the pressure goes down to the bottom.

I work with a lot of clients with pain that is so chronic that they can’t do anything without getting a flare up but that’s all your nervous system. So you can rewire and repattern your nervous system. People think chronic pain is like, you know, you’re not strong enough. No, it’s wiring. It’s capacity and tolerance. So you can change capacity and tolerance, but you need to work within the nervous system…And so like our core patterning has been determined by experiences that we’ve been through that our nervous system have adapted to. If we had a childhood that stunk, we coped in our bodies and our nervous system made sure that we didn’t have to overly feel that tension, like try to mitigate the stress for us. But that’s being held in the nervous system.

Everyone I’ve interviewed in this series has spoken about the power of our words to cast spells. Given the diversity of expertise of those interviewed, that surprised me. In this interview, Lauren spoke about it with regards to the sensation of pain. That sensation is a piece of data, but often that sensation is interpreted as a whole series of things we can and can’t do. She spoke about how she tested the data she received from pain after her back surgery and I think it’s quite useful.

Lauren Ohayon is the creator of Restore Your Core® (RYC®) – a movement program helping women build strength, mobility, and confidence through intelligent, whole-body movement that begins in the core and pelvic floor.

With over two decades of experience in movement education and pelvic floor health, Lauren has guided tens of thousands of women to better understand and trust their bodies. Her method blends movement science, nervous system regulation, and body literacy to support core and pelvic floor healing without fear or fixation.

Known for her candid, compassionate approach, Lauren teaches from lived experience – healing her own back injury and navigating the physical realities of motherhood. Through RYC®, she’s created a safe, empowering space for women to move beyond symptom management and into lasting strength and self-trust.

Lauren is also the co-founder of Body Ready Method®, an evidence-based training for pregnancy, birth, and recovery professionals which is rooted in the Restore Your Core® Method and has certified over 1,800 practitioners worldwide.

Today, Lauren and the 500+ RYC® Teachers around the world continue to help women feel at home in their bodies – strong, long, mobile, and functional for life.

At the end of our conversation, Lauren mentions this podcast by philosopher Alan Watts, about how we think we are our brains, but really we are the universe. Please check it out!

For now, this is the conclusion of my interview series. But now that summer is back, the plants are speaking to me loud and clear. Since my 44th birthday, red clover has been a bright fluorescent magenta color, calling out for my attention. I suspect that is not a coincidence. A plant profile on Red Clover is coming up next. Hopefully, next week.