What CEU Courses Do You Need to Become a Pelvic Health OT?

9 min read

What courses do I take? What path do I follow to become the best pelvic health practitioner I can be?

It's one of the most common questions I get, and the honest answer is that pelvic health education is a bit of the wild west. There's no linear path, especially for OTs. That's confusing for us while we're learning, and it's confusing for clients too, because it's hard to put an experience in a box when everyone took a different route to get there.

"Take the courses that speak to you and you'll build a practice that is deeply authentic to you."

The lack of a path is also the best thing about this field. You can take a fitness-based approach, a hands-on approach like visceral manipulation, a trauma-informed approach, a behavioral approach, an educational approach. Your toolbox ends up plentiful, and you customize each session to the client in front of you. Does it get any better than that?

But "there's no one right path" isn't much help when you're standing at the beginning of it. So here's the path I'd build if I were starting over — the one I wish had existed when I started, and the one I eventually built.

Before anything else, you need the fundamentals: pelvic floor anatomy, how the pelvic floor actually functions, common diagnoses, how to run a client intake, and what internal and external exams involve.

I started teaching OT Pioneers in 2018 for exactly this reason. It's self-paced, it has lifetime access including every update, and it's taught from the OT lens rather than adapted from someone else's profession.

Here's the thing most people don't find out until later though: most intro courses only cover half the pelvic floor.

Colorectal is the other fifty percent, and the majority of pelvic floor therapists never take a course dedicated to it. Which is strange, because very often the poop is driving the pee. That's why OT Elevate exists, and why it's built into the Level 1 curriculum rather than sold as an afterthought.

There are intro courses offered elsewhere, including PT-led programs like Pelvic Floor Level 1. They've always been welcoming to OTs. But they're large-format courses, often fifty-plus students, and the curriculum is primarily PT-based — which usually means throwing out a meaningful chunk of what you learn and adapting the rest yourself. I know, because that's what I did.

This is the step most OTs get stuck on, and it's the one a weekend course can't solve.

Learning pelvic health is already like drinking from a firehose. Trying to master the head knowledge, translate theory into practice, and acquire hands-on skills all at the same time is what leaves people feeling like they have two left hands when Monday rolls around.

What actually builds competence is time. Time to learn, time to implement, time to practice, and time to get feedback. That's the thinking behind the Level 1 Functional Pelvic Health Practitioner™ program: over four months rather than over a weekend, with weekly content, knowledge quizzes, live mentorship calls, a three-day hands-on technique lab, and a skills-based assessment you have to pass to earn the designation.

Most OTs weighing this decision are comparing it against the PT-led option, so here's the honest comparison.

I'm not interested in running anyone else down. Herman & Wallace is a well-established program and many excellent therapists have come through it. It just wasn't built for us.

I think every pelvic floor therapist should be trauma-informed. We're working with the most intimate, vulnerable parts of our clients' bodies, and trauma surfaces in these sessions whether or not we're ready for it.

Most programs barely touch this. A few mention the nervous system in passing. But knowing the buzzwords isn't the same as knowing what to do when a client starts dissociating during internal work, or when the question "how are you feeling?" is met with tears.

The Level 2 Trauma-Informed Pelvic Health Certification is a 3.5-month program covering nervous system regulation, somatic practices, responding to disclosures, and graded exposure — with live mentoring calls and a case study rather than an exam. It's also the only training prerequisite for certification, which brings us to the last step.

First, the thing nobody tells you: you do not need to be certified to practice in pelvic health.

I genuinely recommend working for a few years before pursuing any certification, because our clients are our best teachers. I mean that. Certification is a way to validate expertise you've already built, not a way to acquire it.

When you are ready, you have options. There's the Certified Functional Pelvic Health Practitioner™ credential, which I created. There's the PRPC offered through Herman & Wallace. There's biofeedback certification through the Biofeedback Certification International Alliance.

Here's how the two pelvic health certifications compare.

Herman & Wallace figures as published at the time of writing. Check their site for current requirements and pricing.

One thing worth knowing before you plan around it: the experience requirement is real. You'll need 3,000 hours of pelvic health activity over the last five years — 1,000 of those in direct care, or six months working full time in pelvic health, with the remaining 2,000 able to come from self-study, mentorship calls, conference presentations, even listening to pelvic health podcasts. And you'll need to have been licensed for at least three years. That's a higher bar than it looks, deliberately.

The reason I built it: every other pelvic health credential available to us was designed for another profession and then opened up to OTs. We are the only profession with a practice framework like ours. I wanted a credential built on it, rather than borrowed from somewhere else.

Then specialize

Here's where the path stops being a path and becomes a choice.

Once you have Level 1 knowledge — real foundational understanding plus hands-on competence — you're ready to go deep in whatever population draws you. And most OTs do eventually specialize, because that's where the work gets most satisfying.

There are excellent courses in every one of these areas, and I'd encourage you to take them. Ask therapists you admire which courses changed their practice. Follow people on social media and get a feel for their approach before you commit to their material. There's an abundance of free content out there — absorb it, and notice what resonates.

But here's the thing worth knowing before you spend the money: nearly all of those specialized courses assume you already have Level 1 knowledge.

They're built for practitioners who already understand pelvic floor anatomy and function, who can already run an intake and an exam, and who already have hands-on skills to build on. If you take a specialty course without that foundation, you'll spend it trying to keep up rather than going deep — and you'll get a fraction of the value you paid for.

That's the real argument for order. Not that there's one right path, but that foundations come before specialization, every time.

One more thing that matters more than any course

Find your people.

Join a supportive community. Connect with mentors, formally or informally. Ask the therapists you admire what helped them most. Mentorship is, without question, one of the fastest ways to propel your learning.

And where you can, choose an OT-specific community. Not because other practitioners have nothing to teach us — they have plenty — but because it keeps bringing your frame of reference back to the OT philosophy and the OT lens. That's the thing that makes our contribution to this field distinct, and it's worth protecting while you're learning.