'Ballroom dancing is your real school of life'

Former Strictly star Kristina Rihanoff on why she thought she'd never dance again after becoming a mum and how her daughter Mila is now following in her footsteps

- JEN PHARO

She’s been dancing since she was six years old, but after her daughter Milena was born, Russian professional ballroom dancer Kristina Rihanoff feared she’d never perform again.

Like many mums, Kristina was left with bladder weakness, pelvic floor numbness and a devastating loss of core strength. It took her eight long months to recover and as her next dancing tour loomed, she feared letting everyone down.

“It was scary because you think, ‘Am I ever going to dance again?’” says the former Strictly Come Dancing star. “At the end of the day, it’s my work and I love it.”

Despite her previous fitness levels and lifelong love of yoga, Kristina couldn’t hold a plank pose in the months after her much longed for daughter’s birth.

“I had no sensation of any kind in my pelvic floor area,” she confides. “I’m very body aware so I was like, ‘What is going on?’ I know my body inside out, I have always trained my body and competed at the professional level with very high endurance training so feeling like I couldn’t engage my core, and I couldn’t engage my pelvic floor, it really freaked me out. I was like, ‘What has happened to my body? Where is all of that sensation?’”

Feeling disconnected from her body left Kristina, 47, struggling with her mental health.

“Yes, 100% it affected my mental health,” she says. “Very thankfully I didn’t have postnatal depression, which quite a few people in my circle did have, but I had worries about the work I love. I was like, ‘Well, if this is not gonna get better, then I’m probably not going to be able to dance.’ So that was all very scary. It’s a scary process of thoughts.”

Now Kristina is teaming up with TENA to create a pelvic floor strengthening dance to help women overcome bladder weakness and find the right products to help them until they are back to normal.