Your pelvic floor is a group of muscles that sit at the very bottom of your pelvis, forming a bowl-shaped layer between your legs. If you imagine your pelvis as a basin, the pelvic floor is the base of that basin, stretching from your pubic bone at the front to your tailbone at the back, and out to your sit bones on each side.
Exact Location in Your Body
The pelvic floor sits deep inside your body, so you can’t see it or easily point to it the way you would your biceps or abs. It lines the bottom of your pelvic cavity, which is the bony space formed by your hip bones, sacrum (the spade-shaped bone at the base of your spine), and coccyx (your tailbone). The upper boundary runs along an imaginary line between the pubic bone and the top of the sacrum. The lower boundary connects your sit bones (the bony points you feel when sitting on a hard chair) to the tip of your tailbone.
Think of it as a muscular hammock slung between those bony landmarks. It’s roughly at the level of your underwear line, sitting behind and beneath your genitals. When you sit in a chair, your pelvic floor muscles are the soft tissue pressing against the seat between your sit bones.
What the Pelvic Floor Holds Up
This group of muscles supports the organs that sit inside your pelvis. In everyone, that includes the bladder, the urethra (the tube that carries urine out), the bowel, the rectum, and the anus. In women, the pelvic floor also supports the vagina and uterus. In men, it holds the prostate in place.
Without a functioning pelvic floor, these organs would have no structural support from below. The muscles act as both a shelf and a set of valves, keeping everything in position while also controlling when you release urine, gas, or stool.
The Muscle Layers
The pelvic floor isn’t a single muscle. It’s organized into a superficial (outer) layer and a deep layer, with a key muscle sitting between them.
The deep layer does most of the heavy lifting. It includes three muscles that together form what clinicians call the levator ani. One of these muscles controls urine flow and is commonly weaker in women who have been pregnant or given birth, which contributes to urinary leakage. The others provide the broad physical “floor” that holds pelvic organs in place. A separate deep muscle fans out toward the tailbone and helps stabilize the back of the pelvis.
Sitting between the deep and superficial layers is a sling-shaped muscle that loops around the anal canal, vagina, and urethra. This muscle acts as a constrictor, pulling those passages closed. It’s a major reason you can hold in urine or stool voluntarily.
The superficial layer includes the external anal sphincter and the muscles around the perineum (the area between your genitals and anus). These muscles contain both fast-twitch and slow-twitch fibers, which means they can stay lightly contracted at rest to keep you continent and also squeeze quickly when you cough, sneeze, or laugh.
How to Feel Your Pelvic Floor
Because the pelvic floor is internal, many people aren’t sure they’ve ever consciously engaged it. The simplest way to locate it: next time you urinate, try briefly stopping the stream midflow. The muscles you feel tightening and lifting are your pelvic floor. You can also imagine trying to hold in gas. That squeeze activates the same muscle group. All the pelvic floor muscles contract together, so you don’t need to isolate individual ones.
When these muscles engage correctly, you should feel a subtle lift and tightening deep in the pelvis, not a bearing-down sensation. Your glutes, inner thighs, and abdominal muscles should stay relatively relaxed. If you’re unsure, women can insert a finger into the vagina and men into the rectum, then squeeze. You should feel the muscles tighten and move upward around your finger, then release.
One important note: the midstream urine test is only meant to help you identify the muscles. Don’t practice pelvic floor exercises while urinating regularly, as this can interfere with normal bladder emptying.
Why It Matters
Nearly one in four adult women in the U.S. experience at least one pelvic floor disorder, according to national survey data published in JAMA. Among women 80 and older, that number rises to roughly half. The most common issue is urinary incontinence, affecting about 16% of women, followed by fecal incontinence at 9% and pelvic organ prolapse at about 3%. Men develop pelvic floor problems too, particularly after prostate surgery or with chronic straining.
These numbers reflect what happens when the muscular floor weakens, stretches, or becomes too tight. Pregnancy, childbirth, aging, obesity, heavy lifting, and chronic constipation all place extra demand on these muscles over time. Because the pelvic floor is hidden from view and rarely discussed, many people don’t recognize dysfunction until symptoms like leaking, pressure, or pain become hard to ignore. Knowing where these muscles are and how they feel when they contract is the first step toward keeping them functional.
What Holds It All Together
The pelvic floor muscles don’t work alone. Three major ligaments anchor the muscular structures to the surrounding bones. These connect the sacrum to the sit bones and the lower spine to the hip bones, creating a stable framework that the muscles attach to and pull against. This combination of bone, ligament, and muscle is what gives the pelvic floor its strength and its ability to bear the weight of your abdominal organs while still allowing controlled opening for urination, bowel movements, and childbirth.