Fitness Friday - Diastasis

Fitness Friday is back... at least for today. Some of you questioned if I was talking about the whole pregnant belly thing this week because maybe I was pregnant... wrong. But here is why. I'm now almost 11 months out of having little Tru and my stomach muscles have still not come back together. After months and months of sit ups, crunches, even Ab Ripper X from P90X hasn't done the trick. They are still not together!!! So today I want to talk a little about something called Diastasis which is the fancy term for your stomach muscles not coming back together...

So I checked out this book called Lose Your Mummy Tummy...

The author Julie Tupler talks about all of our different abdominal muscles and how they work, and how they separate when you are carrying a little one inside there. I don't have the book in front of me so I'm going from memory here but she said something like 80-90% of women who have had children have this separation of the transverse abdominal muscles that create the little "mom pooch" that so many of us sport around. She says that it's completely fixable, you just need to do transverse abdominal exercises to pull those muscles that are like a corset around your middle together. It doesn't matter how long ago you had your baby, these exercises can work for anyone with diastasis.

I really liked the book. The main things that I learned from this were that doing crunches that make you go from side to side like the bicycle make the diastasis worse, or the 100's pump that is common in Pilate's also make it worse. That if you have this separation problem you should ONLY do the transverse abdominal exercises until it gets better. So I've been trying that.

So how exactly do you work your transverse abs??? Have you heard the whole "pull your belly button to your spine?" That's it! The book explains this really well and what it feels like to be working that muscle. When you exhale you should pull your belly button as far into your back or spine as you can and hold it there for 30 seconds. Do 10 sets of this 3 times a day. Plus she has other variations of this exercise. Here are some online versions of this exercise here and here.

Having a baby really is so hard on your body. These poor muscles have been through a lot. First, as you can see in the picture below a few posts, they got pretty stretched out in the first place. Add a c-section on top of that where they pull your muscles even farther apart to get the baby out that way... I'm not really surprised that they didn't just magically come back together. Hopefully I can do these exercises and get this mom tummy where it should be, back together! Anyway, I hope this info helps some of you other moms out there too.