Floor It

About this book

Floor It by Dr. Rachel Selman, DPT, is the groundbreaking guide to leveraging your pelvic floor for better sports performance. A strong, responsive pelvic floor is the unsung hero of core strength and your hidden powerhouse for team sports, endurance sports, and power sports. In her pioneering guide to pelvic health in sports, Dr. Rachel Selman, DPT, CSCS, CPSS--the National Strength and Conditioning Association's 2026 Personal Trainer of the Year--offers a fascinating resource to improve awareness around pelvic floor dysfunction and offer guidance in improving its role in sport performance. Men and women alike experience symptoms from a pelvic floor that's weak, tight, or simply out of sync with the demands of their sport. Millions of athletes know the obvious symptoms but don't know how to talk about them; discomforts like leaking during running, jumping, or lifting, feelings of pressure, fullness, or tightness, and pain that's commonly misdiagnosed at the hips or low back. Many sports performance problems start at the pelvis: - Form and technique that falls apart with fatigue in marathon and half-marathon running. - Loss of a fluid, powerful swing in tennis, golf, and baseball. - Recurring, unexplained pain like low back pain, hip pain, labrum tears, muscle strains, abdominal pain, or groin pain. - Problems with bracing, force transfer, and staying strong under heavy weight or force like in weight lifting, power lifting, and football. - Reduced eccentric power when landing, cutting, or decelerating in sports that involve jumping, agility, and quick changes of direction like basketball, football, and soccer. Floor It offers a new path forward by drawing from Selman's thousands of hours of clinical experience with pelvic floor PT. She shares the tools that athletes, physical therapists, personal trainers, and other providers need to begin a pelvic muscle therapy program for sports: - Simple pelvic floor exercises to improve muscle awareness - Effective cues for Kegels, Reverse Kegels, and other pelvic floor exercises - Guidance on her four-phase treatment approach in pelvic floor PT - Ways to integrate pelvic floor exercises into athletic movement patterns - Ways to reduce stress-induced pelvic tightness and pelvic muscle fatigue - Sport-specific considerations for getting back into the game As the foundation of all core strength and the link between the power of the legs and the upper body, the pelvic floor plays a pivotal role in healthy movement in daily life and sports. Explore your pelvic floor with Rachel Selman in Floor It and find out how to end embarrassing or painful symptoms and unlock new power from the ground up--and inside out.