By: Sydney Stevens, PT, DPT, PRPC

You train hard. You lift heavy. You run fast. You give everything to your sport.

But lately, something’s off. Maybe it’s a deep ache in your hip or groin. Maybe it’s high hamstring pain that just won’t go away. Maybe you’ve noticed leakage during heavy lifts or sprints.

A lot of athletes try to push through and deal with it. But here’s the truth is when you ignore these issues, they rarely go away on their own. And when the problem is your pelvic floor, it can throw off your whole game.

Yes, men have a pelvic floor, and it matters for performance

Your pelvic floor does more than just bladder control. It’s a group of muscles that works with your core to stabilize your body, transfer load, and keep you moving efficiently.

When something’s wrong, it can show up as:

  • Prostatitis: Swelling in the prostate that can cause pelvic pain and bathroom problems.
  • Urinary or fecal incontinence: Leaking urine or stool when the pelvic floor isn’t working well.
  • Sports hernias: A painful groin strain that often affects athletes.
  • Adductor overcompensation: Inner thigh muscles tightening up because they’re doing more work than they should.
  • High hamstring pain: Pelvic muscles can cause pain that feels like a hamstring injury.
  • “Sitting on a golf ball” feeling: Tension in the pelvic muscles that makes sitting uncomfortable.

For athletes, the causes are often overuse, poor motor control, or holding your breath during lifts. That breath-holding builds pressure, strains the pelvic floor, and sets off muscle spasms and compensation patterns.

How this impacts your sport

Your pelvic floor is one of the first areas affected when force travels from the ground up into your trunk. If one side is overloaded and the other is underused, you get imbalances. That means weaker muscles in some areas, tighter muscles in others, and a drop in power, speed, and stability.

And sometimes, the problem didn’t start with your sport, but your sport keeps it from healing because of the constant overtraining and overloading.

What treatment can look like

First, let’s clear something up: pelvic floor rehab is not just Kegels. In fact, doing Kegels without knowing what’s going on can make things worse.

Here’s what we do instead:

  • External work: Release tight muscles, strengthen weak ones, correct compensations, and restore functional load.
  • Sport-specific analysis: I look at how you move in your sport, in person or on video, so your treatment connects to real game movements.
  • Internal work (if needed): For true pelvic floor dysfunction, we may do internal trigger point release to directly treat those muscles.

How to protect yourself now

  • Listen to your body. If something’s off, say something.
  • Breathe properly. Avoid holding your breath during lifts or explosive moves.
  • Stay mobile. Work on hips, trunk, and ankles: tightness here can feed into pelvic floor issues.
  • Adjust when you need to. Modify your training if you feel symptoms coming on.

Bottom line for male athletes

Your pelvic floor is part of your athletic foundation. It’s usually the first thing to compensate when something’s wrong, and if you leave it alone, the compensation can become a bigger, long-term problem.

Take care of it now so you can keep playing, lifting, and performing without holding back.

Schedule your sports-focused pelvic floor assessment today and rebuild your strength, stability, and performance from the ground up.