If you’ve ever been told you have weak glutes, a weak core, or a weak pelvic floor, you’re not alone. Those explanations are incredibly common. They’re also often incomplete.
Many people spend months strengthening muscles that never seem to “turn on,” stretching muscles that always feel tight, or faithfully doing pelvic floor exercises without seeing meaningful improvement. The problem isn’t always that a muscle is weak. More often, it’s that the right muscles aren’t contributing at the right time, forcing other muscles to compensate.
At Femina Atlanta, one of the most important things we help patients understand is that your body doesn’t function as a collection of individual muscles. It functions as an integrated system. Every breath you take, every step you walk, every time you lift your child, sit down, stand up, cough, laugh, or reach overhead requires multiple muscles and fascial lines working together with the right timing and the right amount of force. When that coordination breaks down, symptoms begin to appear.
Sometimes that looks like pelvic pain. Other times it looks like hip pain, urinary leakage, constipation, abdominal distension, pain with intercourse, or muscles that constantly feel tight. It is important to understand that the muscles themselves may not be the primary problem. The way they’re work together can be.
Your Brain Doesn’t Think in Individual Muscles
One of the biggest misconceptions in rehabilitation is that your brain activates one muscle at a time. It doesn’t.
Your nervous system thinks in terms of movement, not individual muscles. Every time you stand up from a chair, climb stairs, or lift your baby, dozens of muscles coordinate together to create stability while allowing efficient movement. Rather than telling each muscle exactly when to contract, your brain organizes an entire movement strategy.
When one muscle stops contributing effectively, another naturally begins working harder to compensate.
Initially, that’s incredibly helpful. Compensation allows you to keep moving after pregnancy, surgery, injury, or pain. The problem is that temporary compensations often become permanent movement habits. Over time, some muscles become under-recruited while others do more than their share, making it feel as though certain muscles never “turn on” while others seem to do all the work.
Eventually, those overloaded muscles and tissues begin to fatigue, tighten, or become painful. That’s when symptoms often begin.
Strong Doesn’t Always Mean Coordinated
Imagine an orchestra. Every musician might be incredibly talented. But if everyone plays at a different tempo, the performance falls apart. Your body works the same way.
A muscle can be very strong and still not contribute effectively if it’s recruited too late, stays active too long, or has learned to rely on another muscle to do its job. The opposite is also true. Sometimes the muscles that feel “weak” aren’t actually weak at all. They’re simply not being recruited efficiently within the movement pattern. This is why strengthening doesn’t always solve the problem. Sometimes it reinforces it.
The muscles become stronger. The movement strategy never improves. And if the movement strategy doesn’t change, the symptoms often don’t either.
Why Coordination Changes
Your body is remarkably adaptable. When something isn’t working well, your nervous system finds another way to accomplish the task. That adaptation can often develop:
- After pregnancy
- Following abdominal or pelvic surgery
- After an orthopedic injury
- In association with chronic pain
Even prolonged sitting, repetitive movement, joint stiffness, or changes in breathing mechanics can influence how your body recruits muscles.
None of these adaptations are inherently bad. They’re simply your body’s best solution at the time. The challenge is that temporary solutions often become long-term movement patterns.
As these compensations become established, some muscles gradually become under-recruited while others begin working overtime. Glutes may stop contributing efficiently, hip flexors may become dominant, the pelvic floor may become overactive, and the abdominal wall may lose its ability to coordinate effectively. Eventually, these altered movement strategies begin driving symptoms rather than preventing them.
Sound familiar? That’s usually not a strength or flexibility problem. It’s a coordination problem.
The Pelvic Floor Doesn’t Work Alone
The pelvic floor is frequently blamed for symptoms like pelvic pain, urinary urgency or leakage, constipation, and pain with intercourse. While it certainly plays an important role, it’s often not the only problem.
Like every other muscle in your body, the pelvic floor is designed to work as part of a team. It coordinates with your diaphragm, abdominal wall, glutes, hip muscles, and deep core to provide support, manage pressure, and help control movement. When some of those muscles become under-recruited, others naturally begin working harder to compensate. More often than not, the pelvic floor is one of the muscles that picks up the slack.
Over time, that increased workload can lead to muscle tension, overactivity, difficulty relaxing, reduced endurance, and persistent pain, often contributing to hypertonic pelvic floor dysfunction.
That’s why treatment focused only on the pelvic floor doesn’t always create lasting results. Understanding why the pelvic floor began compensating is often the missing piece.
We See This Every Day
One of the most common things we hear from patients is:
- “I can never feel my glutes working.”
- “No matter what I do, I still have pelvic floor pain.”
- “My hamstrings and hips are always tight.”
- “By the end of the day I look pregnant.”
- “I’ve been doing the exercises but nothing seems to change”.
These experiences aren’t random. They’re often signs that your body has developed a compensatory movement strategy where some muscles have become under-recruited while others are working too much. Over time, these compensations become so automatic that they feel normal. The muscles doing too much work become tight, painful, or fatigued, while the muscles that aren’t contributing enough become even more difficult to recruit.
This is why adding more strengthening or stretching doesn’t always solve the problem.
If the movement strategy hasn’t changed, the same muscles will continue compensating, regardless of how strong or flexible they become. The goal isn’t simply to strengthen an inhibited muscle or relax an overactive one. It’s to restore coordination so the workload is shared more efficiently across the entire system.
When the right muscles begin contributing at the right time, the muscles that have been carrying too much of the load finally have an opportunity to relax. That’s often when lasting change begins.
What Does Treatment Look Like?
Once where coordination has broken down has been identified, treatment shifts from simply strengthening muscles to helping them work together more efficiently. The goal isn’t to force an under-recruited muscle to “turn on” or simply stretch a muscle that’s working overtime. Instead, we focus on understanding why that compensation developed in the first place and restoring a more efficient movement strategy.
Depending on your individual findings, treatment may include manual therapy to improve mobility, neuromuscular reeducation to restore muscle recruitment, movement retraining, progressive strengthening, or mobility exercises that helps the right muscles contribute at the right time.
As coordination improves, muscles no longer have to compensate for one another. The muscles that have been overworking finally get a chance to relax, while the muscles that have been under-recruited begin contributing more naturally.
The goal isn’t perfect movement. It’s helping your body share the workload more efficiently so no single muscle or group of muscles has to keep picking up the slack.
Coordination Is Different for Everyone
No two people compensate the same way. One person may stop recruiting their glutes and begin relying on their hip flexors and low back, while another may develop an overactive pelvic floor because other stabilizing muscles aren’t contributing enough. For someone else, changes in rib cage movement and breathing mechanics may be one of the factors contributing to the way the rest of the body compensates. Whether those changes develop after pregnancy, surgery, an injury, or years of living with pain, the body adapts by creating a new movement strategy.
Even when two people have the same diagnosis, the underlying movement strategy may be completely different. That’s why there isn’t a single exercise that works for everyone.
Understanding which muscles are under-recruited, which are compensating, and why those patterns developed is often the key to creating lasting change.
The diagnosis may be the same. The compensation strategy rarely is.
You Can’t Always Feel Poor Coordination
Many people assume they’ll know when a muscle isn’t doing its job. Unfortunately, that’s rarely the case.
One of the most common things we hear is, “I had no idea I was doing that.”
Most movement patterns happen automatically. You don’t consciously think about which muscles stabilize your pelvis when you walk, which muscles engage when you climb stairs, or how your body distributes force when you lift your baby. I like to tell patients that the brain doesn’t tell you how it’s going to compensate nor ask your permission… it’s just going to figure out how to accomplish the task you are telling it to do.
Over time, compensatory movement patterns become your new normal. You simply learn to move around the problem.
That’s why many people continue to feel their hip flexors, low back, or pelvic floor doing all the work while struggling to recruit their glutes or deep abdominal muscles. For many, the result is a pelvic floor that simply won’t relax, even when they’re trying to let it go.
Before muscles can work differently, the nervous system has to recognize a more efficient movement strategy. That’s where retraining coordination becomes just as important as building strength.
Improving Coordination Takes Practice, Not Perfection
The good news is that movement patterns can change.
Your nervous system is constantly adapting. Just as it learned compensatory movement strategies over time, it can also learn more efficient ones. That process isn’t about doing more exercises or working harder. It’s about helping the right muscles contribute at the right time, while allowing the muscles that have been working overtime to finally do less.
As coordination improves, movement becomes more efficient, forces are shared more evenly throughout the body, and unnecessary compensation begins to decrease. This doesn’t happen overnight.
Like any skill, coordinated movement takes repetition, consistency, and practice.
But when the body no longer has to rely on the same compensatory patterns, many people notice they move with less effort, experience less pain, and finally begin making progress after feeling stuck for months or even years.
Working Together Changes Everything
Your body wasn’t designed for one muscle to do all the work. It was designed for muscles to share the workload. When they do, movement becomes more efficient, unnecessary tension begins to decrease, and symptoms often improve.
Sometimes the solution isn’t making one muscle stronger. It’s helping the entire system work together again.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can muscles be strong and still contribute to pain?
Yes. A muscle can be strong but still contribute to pain if it isn’t being recruited efficiently or is compensating for another area that’s no longer contributing enough. Lasting improvement often depends on restoring coordination, not simply increasing strength.
What does it mean if a muscle is under-recruited?
An under-recruited muscle isn’t necessarily weak. It simply isn’t contributing as effectively as it should during movement. As a result, other muscles often work harder to compensate, which can eventually lead to pain, tightness, fatigue, or reduced movement efficiency.
Can poor muscle coordination contribute to pelvic floor dysfunction?
Yes. The pelvic floor works together with your abdominal wall, hips, glutes, diaphragm, and deep core muscles. When these muscles stop coordinating efficiently, the pelvic floor often compensates by becoming overactive, tense, or fatigued, contributing to symptoms such as pelvic pain, urinary symptoms, constipation, or pain with intercourse.
Why doesn’t strengthening always fix pelvic pain?
Strengthening improves a muscle’s capacity, but it doesn’t automatically change how muscles work together. If compensatory movement patterns remain unchanged, symptoms often persist even as muscles become stronger.
How does pelvic floor physical therapy improve muscle coordination?
Pelvic floor physical therapy focuses on identifying the underlying movement patterns contributing to your symptoms. Treatment may include manual therapy, neuromuscular reeducation, movement retraining, strengthening, and mobility exercises to help restore efficient muscle recruitment and reduce unnecessary compensation throughout the body.
References
- Hodges PW, Sapsford R, Pengel LH. Postural and respiratory functions of the pelvic floor muscles.Neurourology and Urodynamics. 2007;26(3):362-371.
- Comerford MJ, Mottram SL. Movement and stability dysfunction: Contemporary developments. Manual Therapy. 2001;6(1):15-26.
- Van Dieën JH, Reeves NP, Kawchuk G, van Dillen LR, Hodges PW. Motor control changes in low back pain: Divergence in presentations and mechanisms. Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy.2019;49(6):370-379.
- Lee D. The Pelvic Girdle: An Integration of Clinical Expertise and Research. 5th ed. Elsevier; 2019.
- Kolar P, Neuwirth J, Sanda J, et al. Analysis of diaphragm movement during tidal breathing and its relationship to spinal stability. Clinical Biomechanics. 2009;24(2):171-177.