Weeks 1–2
Pain
Calm it down first.
Breath work, hands-on release and down-training take the edge off pain, urgency and pressure, starting your very first visit.
What We Treat
Pelvic Floor Dysfunction treatment in North Liberty.
Leaking on the treadmill. Pressure that builds by evening. Pain with sex you have never said out loud. Somebody told you to do Kegels. Kegels are not a diagnosis. A cause-first evaluation is.
Sound Familiar?
Does this sound like you?
- Leaking when you cough, sneeze, laugh, or pick something up
- Knowing where every bathroom is before you leave the house
- Heaviness or pressure low in your pelvis that builds through the day
- Pain during sex, or with a tampon, that you have never mentioned to anyone
- Straining on the toilet, or never quite feeling finished
- A core that will not switch on, no matter how many planks you do
Two or more? Keep reading.
Why It Happens
Kegels are not a diagnosis.
Your pelvic floor is a group of muscles, and muscles fail in more than one direction. Some are too weak to hold. Some are so tight they cannot let go. Plenty are strong enough but fire at the wrong moment, so pressure lands where it should not. A birth, a surgery, years of holding your breath through heavy lifting, a gut that has been unhappy for a decade: any of it can set the pattern. That is why the same handout of squeezes helps one person and makes the next one worse. And left alone, the pattern usually widens. What started as leaking on a run becomes leaking on a sneeze.
You have already read everything. You have already tried the app, the ball, the three exercises somebody printed for you. That is exactly the kind of patient who does well here. Dr. Alex Furtado, DPT, CPPC, leads pelvic health at Motion Matters, with more than a decade across orthopedics, sports physical therapy and pelvic health in New England, training as a birth and postpartum doula, and certifications in fitness through pregnancy, postpartum recovery and the menopause transition. She starts with a cause-first evaluation, one-on-one, and tells you which direction your pelvic floor is actually failing in.
About the exam, since it is the question nobody wants to ask out loud: an internal assessment is one option, not the price of admission. It gets explained before anything happens, you can say no, and you can change your mind partway through. Plenty of first visits are history, breathing, posture and hip testing. You are in control the whole time.
The Honest Truth
Waiting doesn’t make it wait on you.
If you keep waiting
- The rest of your body starts compensating, and the compensations start hurting too
- Flare-ups get closer together, and take longer to settle each time
- You move less to avoid the pain, which weakens the exact things that were protecting you
If you start this week
- Visit one is a cause-first evaluation, and you leave knowing what we found
- Hands-on treatment starts the same day, not after a second appointment
- You get a plan with an endpoint: a real one, not an open tab of visits
Nobody regrets starting too early. Plenty of people tell us they wish they had come in sooner.
How We Fix It
The same four phases. Built for your pelvic floor.
Every plan has an endpoint. Here’s what the four phases look like for pelvic floor dysfunction.
Weeks 2–6
Prime
Get the coordination back.
Your pelvic floor relearns how to contract and, just as importantly, how to fully let go, in time with your breath and your ribs.
Weeks 6–10
Perform
Load it like real life.
Strength work moves out to the hips, abdominals and back, then gets tested on stairs, on lifts and on whatever you actually do all day.
Weeks 10+
Prevent
Keep it handled yourself.
You leave knowing your own early warning signs and the two or three things that keep them quiet: that’s the endpoint, not another standing appointment.
Natalie is such a skilled PT and really works to help you get control of life factors to move beyond pain.
Mary M. · on what the care is like · Google review
Phase one: settle the pain, the urgency and the guarding
Phase four: loaded like real life, then finished
Pelvic Floor Dysfunction
Pain to Prevent
Questions, Answered
What people ask before booking pelvic floor therapy.
No. An internal assessment is one option among several, and it is always your choice. Your therapist explains what it involves and why it might help before anything happens, and you can decline it, pause it, or change your mind partway through. Plenty of first visits are history, breathing, posture, hip and movement testing, with no internal work at all. Nothing happens without your consent, and you stay in control the whole time.
Because a Kegel only addresses one of the possible problems. If your pelvic floor is already too tight, squeezing it harder tends to make pain, pressure and urgency worse. That’s the point of a cause-first evaluation, one-on-one with a licensed physical therapist: we find out which direction yours is actually failing in before anyone hands you exercises. Then the plan matches the cause instead of the guess.
A full plan for pelvic floor dysfunction runs through all four phases, Pain, Prime, Perform, and Prevent, and how long that takes depends on how long you’ve been dealing with it. Either way, you get a plan with an endpoint: you’ll always know which phase you’re in and what’s left, not an open-ended string of appointments.
Book Your Visit
Ready when you are.
Request a time and a real person calls you back. No phone tree. No ‘someone will reach out.’ Just a plan.
- Hours Mon-Fri: 8:00 am - 5:00 pm
- (319) 382-2743 Prefer to talk now? Call us.
- No referral needed in Iowa
4.9 · 79 Google reviews
Typical response: under 2 business hours
Step 1 of 5
Request sent.
That’s the hard part done. We’ll call during business hours to lock in your time.
Visit Us
Care this good, this close.
Motion Matters Physical Therapy and Wellness
- 660 West Cherry St. Suite 2, North Liberty, IA 52317 (opens in a new tab)
- (319) 382-2743
- Fax: (319) 359-4114
- natalie@ptmotionmatters.com
- Mon-Fri: 8:00 am - 5:00 pm