Are All Diastasis Recti the Same?

For this blog, I wanted to write about why there is no cookie-cutter set of exercises that help you recover from diastasis recti. No diastasis recti looks exactly the same and the exercises that I give to my patients or people I know depend on different needs, factors, and circumstances.

What Is Diastasis Recti

It is the splitting of your abdomen anywhere along the midline from your sternum down to your pubic bone that can often happen when we’re pregnant and sometimes it doesn’t just heal on its own. The important thing to note though is that diastasis recti does not only happen to pregnant people. I have lots of men in the office who have diastasis recti as well and it can occur because of lifting something that’s too heavy, it could be from rapid weight gain, or a variety of other things.

Basically, diastasis is a pressure problem. You have an unequal amount of intra abdominal pressure or just a mass in that area. It’s too much strain for the linea alba, the center and fascial line down your abdomen and then there is some thinning in that area and it loses its integrity causing it to split. 

A cool thing to know is that most newborns are born with diastasis recti. If you notice your newborn when they’re learning how to move their legs, their head, and when they roll over, they are going to have that doming down the centerline. As they get stronger through learning those fundamental developments like breathing, they develop diaphragm engagement and that helps them to regulate their intra abdominal pressure, they will be strong enough. This strength will help them lift their legs, their arms, they can rock side to side, they can start rolling, coming up onto a side oblique sit, and more. That’s what Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS) is based off of. A lot of their exercises are putting people through those fundamental milestones that we do as newborns to help us peel back the layers of whatever asymmetries that daily real life has given us and we try to get back to the basics.

That’s how babies heal their diastasis recti and that’s why it’s important to not put your baby in a seat, a walker, a bumbo seat because you want them to hit the milestones in the right pattern so they can heal that diastasis recti on their own. 

Healing Diastasis Anytime Is Possible

If you’ve healed diastasis recti once when you were a baby, you can definitely bring about some positive change again after you’ve had a baby. Even if you’re 20 years postpartum or more, you can still bring about positive change after a certain amount of time.

Breathing Helps With Diastasis Recti

People ask me to give them a few exercises to help with diastasis. I would suggest starting with breathing. This is something most people don’t want to hear because they usually want to jump into something difficult to make them feel like they’re getting somewhere. Breathwork can be tailored to a person to help them more specifically. I recently wrote a blog about breathing correctly and how you are breathing tells us something. For your infrasternal angle, the angle of your rib cage in the front, you can check if it is less than 90 degrees or greater than 90 degrees. If it is greater, you are probably more likely inter abdominal oblique geared. If you’re narrower than 90 degrees, you’re probably leaning towards external abdominal oblique. That changes how we look at what we’re working on.

Another thing would be, where is your diastasis? Is it above your belly button, at your belly button, or below. That also will tweak where and how we do your exercises. There is not a one size fits all exercise program for diastasis.

Sometimes, the things that you ask your patients to do are not the things that they want to do. For example, if you have that really cinched in waist, where it kind of drastically dents in, and your belly button dents in, it’s almost like you’ve been chronically drawing your navel to your spine.  That can be a sign that you tend to suck in all the time. I understand that the pressures of society can make you want to have that flat stomach, that narrow waist, but the kicker of that is when you chronically draw your belly button in, we often get that terrible lower belly pooch. That is because, with the cinching of the waist, the pressure has to go somewhere else.  That would be going down towards your pelvic floor causing you to have issues or prolapse, or the pooching of your lower abs. That would be a turning off or not being able to tap into the lower transverse abdominus.

When we are looking at that rib angle I wrote about earlier, that is looking at what’s more active – your internal oblique or your external oblique. External is the most superficial, internal is the next level, and then transverse is the deepest layer. You can have a lot of tension and tightening in your middle transverse abdominus where you have that cinched in waist and you are not able to relax it and contract back and forth as well as not being able to tap into the lower transverse abdominis. You might not be symmetrically tight in your entire transverse abdominis when this happens. 

No Diastasis Recti Look Exactly The Same

Because no diastasis recti looks exactly the same, we measure it in two ways. We measure the width and the depth and we look for how the integrity of that lineal alba feels. We check if it’s super squishy, if there is no resistance at all as you press on it. The width tells us if we’re more oblique in transverse dominant or rectus dominant. The rectus abdominis is the six-pack muscle. It goes from the sternum and rib area all the way down to the pubic bone. It draws the linea alba together, but does not improve the tension of the linea alba or depth.  That is done by the obliques and transversus.

Another thing is that when someone has tried to rush the drawing together of the diastasis without working on their rib cage mobility.  This can lead to the pressure in the abdomen to press down on the pelvic floor and sometimes cause dysfunction or prolapse. That’s something we want to work on so that the core is getting worked symmetrically to manage the pressure properly with our pelvic floor. 

When we’re thinking about diastasis and prolapse, they are similar in that your pressure is not managed properly in your canister of your core and it’s going to find a place to go. It is going to happen in the form of a diastasis, prolapse, hernia, and the like. For hernia, it can be an umbilical hernia for men. Lots of male patients who have diastasis recti struggle and suffer from inguinal and hiatal hernia. Hernias are a pressure problem and so are prolapse and diastasis recti. Disc herniation is also a pressure problem because if you cannot manage your intra abdominal pressure well, you are at risk of having one of those kinds of pressure problems. It would be good for everyone to be mindful and know where their biases lead them and try to do some exercises that balance that out so that they don’t end up with a pressure problem.

Conclusion

With these in mind, I hope I was able to explain why I cannot give just one set of exercises for treating diastasis recti. It’s trial and error and dependent on what you as a person are having going on.

If you have any questions, you can drop it in the comment section or you can send me a message through Facebook or Instagram. I’d be happy to do another podcast about your questions. Also, if you want me to talk about something specific, let me know!

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