If you’re like most women, you don’t know much about your pelvic floor muscles. We can’t see them, we usually don’t feel them, and we pretty much ignore them most of the time.

But this group of muscles is vital to our sexual health, and they play an important role in pregnancy and birth. Your pelvic floor muscles run from behind your pubic bone in the front to the tail bone (coccyx) at the back, like a sling. The urethra, vagina and rectum pass through these muscles.

They have many nerves associated with them and play a key role in orgasm. These muscles contract and relax, and provide much of the pleasurable sexual sensation we experience.

They’re also essential in birthing a baby and in recovering from childbirth. A lax or relaxed pelvic floor can allow urinary or stool leakage or even change how you feel orgasm.

Condition your muscles

Maybe you’ve heard about Kegel exercises, named for the doctor who invented the movements that strengthen the pelvic floor. These exercises, now more commonly called pelvic floor exercises, involve contracting your pelvic floor muscles and then relaxing them.

You can discover your muscles in a couple of ways. Try starting and stopping your urine stream, voila, those are your pelvic muscles. Stand with one leg directly in front of another and squeeze together, again, that’s your pelvic floor in action.

Tone your whole pelvic floor

Both of these approaches, though, only focus on one part of the muscle rather than the whole group. A better way of figuring out what it feels like to engage all of the muscles in this group is to insert a finger into your vagina and squeeze. Once you feel all of your muscles contracting and relaxing you’ll be able exercise these muscles daily. As you regularly contract your pelvic floor, you strengthen it.

We often don’t pay attention to relaxing our muscles, which is just as important as stregthening them. When you tighten these muscles, you then need to actively relax them—so contract and then relax by blowing out a deep breath. You are working too hard at strengthening your pelvic floor if you begin to experience pain with arousal, intercourse or when having a bowel movement. Ease off of conditioning until these complications go away.

We all know that physical activity makes you feel better, move better, and look better. And that works on the inside too—a healthy and toned pelvic floor benefits our bladder and bowel health as well as our sexual health and satisfaction too!