What is diastasis?

Hi guys, I’m Nathalie Clough and today I’m here to talk to you out pre and postnatal exercises with pilates and exercises that you can do to help support your body

So diastasis is a really important topic. Often I get mothers who understand being quite concerned about it, or have had sort of scare-mongering sort of comments thrown out about it.

It is a naturally occurring thing that happens. So as you get bigger, there is no space for your baby. If your abs do not split. So if you think of where my abdominal wall is, which is here and your baby’s coming out through the front, so your abdominal wall needs to split an hour in order to allow your baby to grow.

Now, the size of the diastasis depends on so many factors. It’s hormonal it’s whether or not it’s your first or second child, it’s how big you are, whether or not you’re hyper mobile loads of different things.

But the important thing to remember is that it is natural and not to worry about what we need to be worrying about and what we need to be looking for is the pressure coming through the abdominal wall when you’re doing things like cough up or any abdominal exercises.

And obviously we want to be avoiding that. So if you see that stop and reach out to someone, because you’re going to need to ask how to make sure that you draw in rather than push out, chances are, you’re just probably applying a little bit, too much force that isn’t really necessary. So stop trying so hard.

Wqually after you’ve, after you’ve had your baby diastasis will naturally come back together and naturally comes back again. There are other factors that help it come back together a little bit more than others, such as breastfeeding, etc.

But essentially that is why you need to have your abdominal checked. So two fingers or one fingers, you can check that yourself or speak to one of the health physios about it, because when you have two fingers, as opposed to one thing, or you don’t want to be curling up and doing any abdominal work again, because of that pressure coming through the abdominal wall,