From the Glottis to the Pelvic Floor: Clinical Connections

Overview

Most pelvic health courses start at the pelvic floor and stay there. This one starts at the glottis — and in doing so, fundamentally reframes how you understand the pressure system your patients live in every day.

 Julie Wiebe and Susan Clinton have built a 2.75-hour conceptual course that traces the anatomical, neurophysiological, and mechanical connections running from the larynx and upper airway through the diaphragm and down to the pelvic floor, arguing convincingly that treating the pelvis in isolation is leaving significant clinical gains on the table.

The course addresses how faulty breathing mechanics, glottal compensations, spinal alignment, and autonomic nervous system tone all feed into the same pressure environment that drives continence, prolapse, lumbopelvic pain, and movement dysfunction. If you have ever discharged a patient who did everything right and still had symptoms, or prescribed a kegel program and wondered why it wasn't enough, this course is the missing clinical context.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

1. Describe the function of three anatomical components of the epiglottal system, including the role of the glottis in airway protection, phonation, and breathing coordination with the diaphragm.
   
   
2. Identify three steps in the trigeminal/vagal alarm system and explain how this system mediates cervical muscle tone, breathing pattern, and downstream effects on pelvic floor function.
   
   
3. Discuss three pieces of evidence linking the intra-abdominal pressure system and pelvic health dysfunction, including the relationship between thoracic alignment and pelvic organ prolapse.
   
   
4. Develop three intervention strategies that address pelvic health considerations within therapeutic exercise programs for orthopaedic and sports medicine populations.
   
   
5. Integrate breath mechanics and vocalization strategies into three transitional movement patterns — such as sit-to-stand, lifting, and squatting — using variable input approaches.
   
   
6. Justify three upper airway intervention strategies (using speech, swallow, or respiration) within a treatment program for patients presenting with low back pain and incontinence.
   
   
7. Explain the relationship between spinal alignment, intra-abdominal pressure management, and the prevalence of pelvic organ prolapse, drawing on current evidence.

Audience

This course is designed for physiotherapists, occupational therapists, athletic therapists, and kinesiologists who want to move beyond isolated pelvic floor treatment and toward a whole-system approach to proximal control, movement, and function. It is particularly well-suited to pelvic health physiotherapists who regularly encounter patients with persistent or complex presentations that don't resolve with standard pelvic floor rehabilitation, as well as orthopaedic and sports medicine clinicians who want to understand why pelvic health considerations belong in their practice too.

PTAs and OTAs will gain valuable context for understanding the reasoning behind integrated, multi-system treatment plans. Athletic trainers and kinesiologists working with high-performance or active populations will find the pressure management and movement strategy content directly applicable to training program design. All practitioners should apply course content within their jurisdictional scope of practice.

Why This Course Matters

The clinical model most practitioners were trained in treats the pelvic floor as a local structure managed through isolated strengthening or relaxation — but the research increasingly does not support that lens.

Faulty breathing patterns have stronger documented associations with back pain than obesity or physical activity levels, and the upper respiratory system exerts direct neurophysiological influence on the very muscles clinicians most commonly try to rehabilitate in the pelvis. The diaphragm, glottis, hyoid, and cervical musculature are not separate from pelvic health — they are upstream contributors to it.

What this course offers is the clinical architecture to connect those dots: a framework for understanding how alignment, respiration, intra-abdominal pressure, and autonomic tone interact in real patients, and practical strategies for using that understanding to improve outcomes. For clinicians who work with athletic or active populations, this is especially pressing — pelvic floor dysfunction in female athletes is well-documented and frequently undertreated, in part because the tools being used don't account for the demands that performance environments place on the whole pressure system.

This course includes prescribable patient exercises available through your Embodia membership.

Related Learning

You can find additional resources on this topic below:

• Pelvic Health Intake Forms, Outcome Measures & Chart Templates in Embodia — relevant for clinicians who take this course and want to update their pelvic health intake workflow.
  
  
• Pelvic Health, Female Athletes & Performance: What If Our Model Is Wrong? — the Embodia blog post on pelvic health and female athletes aligns directly with the athletic population content in this course.
  
  
• Embodia Pelvic Health courses — a filtered view of pelvic health continuing education would give clinicians a path to other related content after purchasing this course.