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Episode 03: How to choose your doula?
How to choose your doula? In today’s episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ann Fulcher, doula and head of the Hearts and Hands UCSD
Leslie December 15, 2021
Diastasis recti rehab 101: where and when to begin?
Postpartum recovery should be started sooner rather than later. I’m not talking about crazy workouts or hard-core abs workouts, as soon as you’re out from the hospital. It’s a big No-No.
However, you’d be surprised to know that there are some very gentle exercises you can do right after giving birth. Literally in the minutes after, while you’re still in the delivery room. And it doesn’t involve any equipment or even standing on your feet. Did you guess what it is?
If you’ve been following me even a tiny bit, you know that I’m pretty big on breathing. What I call DCP breathing: Diaphragmatic, deep Core, Pelvic floor breathing. I know it doesn’t sound straight forward.
In the video above, I began by showing you how to breathe properly:
- Relaxing your back on the mat, finding length in your spine
- Breathing in through the nose
- Breathing out through the mouth, lifting the pelvic floor muscles, bringing the belly button to the mat and up to your ribs
- Holding for a few seconds
- Breathing in again, belly to the sky, everything’s relaxed
With some practice, this is very easy to do and a powerful breathing technique. This has been used for years and years.
Lifting the pelvic floor muscles can really help alleviate some pain associated with tearing. No need to squeeze these muscles really hard. A tiny and gentle lift will do it.
Now, you most likely will have trouble feeling the lift at first. Just visualize it. Your pelvic floor is like a hammock anchored to your ischium to the sides (your buttocks bones), your coccyx in the back and your pubic bone in the front. Imagine that you pull this hammock right in the middle and lift it up. Then, when relaxing, let the hammock go back down to its starting position.
Adding some deep core muscle engagement to the mix will help “massage” and drain your uterus, intestines, kidneys and bladder. It will help you stimulate your bowel movement and miction, but also alleviate the pressure on the different ligaments around, stimulate their vascularization (and thus recovery) and their retraction (avoiding and preventing prolapse). It also helps avoiding lower body edema by promoting blood and lymph flows.
Most of all, when repeated over time, this type of breathing is the cornerstone of your abs and pelvic floor recovery, that is absolutely needed, for every woman, after giving birth.
So now that you know a bit more about DCP breathing, let’s talk a bit more about postpartum recovery.
Whether or not you have diastasis recti, you should consider it. If you gave birth a couple of months ago or even years ago, it’s still something you should implement today. Especially if lower back pain, hip pain, sudden need to go pee when laughing or sneezing, urinary incontinence, or pain when sneezing, is something you experience.
When to start?
- You can start right away after giving birth with the DCP breathing. There are many different ways to practice this kind of breathing, making it a bit more challenging over time. Like doing a hip bridge as I showed in the video.
- Then adding some isometric exercises: meaning that you add some work from your rectus abdominis, glutes, adductors and obliques BUT without movement. It’s all in the intention and works wonders!
- Around 3 weeks, you can progress with slightly more challenging exercises targeting the same muscles and involving a bit more movement from other parts of your body, or more powerful ones. Still very safe and really low impact.
- Diastasis recti can be tested as soon as 3 weeks. You can start adding this type of simple and quick exercises once you feel up for it and can spend some time working on it.
The goal here is to work on the different muscles involved in your pelvic floor and abdominal integrity, protecting your pelvic floor without building too much intra-abdominal pressure, bringing the lower ribs and iliac bones closer to each other, ensuring a good posture and most of all, addressing and preventing any lower back or hip pain, low energy, prolapse and helping you feeling stronger day after day.
5 exercises for diastasis recti + pdf
If you want to keep a copy of these exercises, I made it easy for you to go back to them as often as you need and want.
You can download my free step-by-step pdf guide with some anatomical considerations and a reminder of how to self-test for diastasis recti. You can download it now and keep a record of it!
These diastasis recti exercises are safe to be done at any time, but as I said in the beginning, listen to you body. If at any moment you feel any type of discomfort in your lower back or hip, stop where you are, lie on your back and keep breathing.
Click the link below to download a pdf version of your diastasis recti workout now!
