The Healthy Post Natal Body Podcast

Can diastasis recti be healed whilst your still breastfeeding? Of course!..and some other stuff.

July 31, 2022 Peter Lap
The Healthy Post Natal Body Podcast
Can diastasis recti be healed whilst your still breastfeeding? Of course!..and some other stuff.
Show Notes Transcript

In this week's, nice and brief,  episode I answer the question whether you can heal diastasis recti whilst you're breastfeeding.

For some reason some healthcare professionals don't understand how breastfeeding impacts the body, but it DEFINITELY doesn't make your muscles stop working like muscles!!

Also, again, diastasis recti is not "for life and you will always have to maintain it".

And finally; "21 day challenges to heal diastasis recti"? Oh, just please don't!

Remember to follow us on Instagram and Facebook for the competitions, wisdom and cute videos. And, of course, you can always find us on our YouTube channel if you like your podcast in video form with little pictures :)

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Email peter@healthypostnatalbody.com if you have any questions or comments 

Playing us out this week;  "Side step" by Cast of Characters..because, why not something jazzy?

Hey, welcome to the Healthy Postnatal Body Podcast. It's your postnatal extra Peter Lap, that as always would be me. What am I talking about today? Today we are talking, can you still fix your diastasis recti when you're breastfeeding? And is diastasis recti for life? Is it forever? Basically it is one of those episodes. It's a nice short one. This is diastasis recti, the gift that keeps on giving. Actually is more healthcare professionals or the gift that keeps on giving in this particular case. These are just three of the things I heard this week that I thought, you know what? That is what I'm going to do a quick little episode about. It'll be fun. Relax you head back. Here we go.

 

Hey, welcome to the Healthy Postnatal Body podcast. This is me, Peter Lap. I am joined today by little kitty, Pegasus, Peggy and Buddyy. This is the podcast for the 31st of July, 2022. I hope you're well. This will be a nice short one guys because to be honest, I'm not really in the mood. We lost little Red this week. My sound, my companion, my sound engineer on the podcast, so to speak got run over by a car. So I'm a little bit, yeah, I'm just not in the mood. I'm not feeling it much, but I am a professional. So we're plowing on and we're getting this done. It'll be a short episode, like I said, because I do want to talk about this a little bit. I've got a ton of other stuff coming up as well, by the way, just in case you're like, yeah, but Pete what's happening?

 

I've got two interviews that I'm editing at the moment. So there's the next couple of weeks sorted. I'm doing the first time mom's podcast tomorrow, which is with Helen, who I spoke to last week. I've got a tremendous interview coming up with Brian Keane, theman, the myth, the legend that is Brian Keane. And we're talking all things nutrition related and the guy is a beast. So that'll be fun. They'll be a great, great episode to listen to. If you don't know Brian, then you should look him up, Brian Keaneg. The guy is great fun. It'll be good fun. 

 

What am I talking about today? Something I came across when someone's healthcare professional said this to them. They said, basically you cannot heal diastasis recti whilst you're still breastfeeding because you have all the hormones in the body. And that sort of comment makes me die a little bit. I've spoken about postpartum hormones before, relaxing, prolactin and all that sort of stuff. So I'm not going to go into too much depth. I did point out that prolactin especially will mean that you'll likely be 5 to 10 pounds heavier and that could have an impact on diastasis recti depending on where that weight sits and all that sort of stuff. However prolactin is a hormone that you produce when breastfeeding and that will take a little while to come out of your system at least until after you stopped breastfeeding or expressing or any of that sort of stuff. Basically when the milk stops coming out your boobies, the level of prolactin will stop, to be a bit blunt about it.

 

But that doesn't mean that you can't heal your diastasis recti. That just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. As I've mentioned before, diastasis recti is caused by basically muscle weakness, internal pressure being too much for your core to deal with. So what needs to happen, is the right muscles need to be strengthened up. Now there's no one that says that breastfeeding means that you can't build big biceps. Breastfeeding means that you can't build strong legs. So why would that be different for healing diastasis recti? It just doesn't make sense. If you do the right muscle strengthening exercises and in some cases, muscle relaxing exercises on the other end, but predominantly the right muscle strengthening exercises, then your diastasis recti will heal. It is that simple? This is just not rocket science otherwise I wouldn't be able to do it because I'm an idiot. 

 

But that is just the way it is. And it baffles me that there are healthcare professionals out there and we're talking GPs here, so we're not talking people that really know what they're talking about when it comes to diastasis recti. And one or two physios. But again, your physio is not an expert in postpartum stuff unless they're postpartum physios. There's a big, big difference between a postpartum physio and the normal physio that deals with knee, shoulder pain and all that sort of stuff. This is a speciality guys. You can't just go to random physios because they don't deal with this stuff often enough. 

 

So anyways, if you do the right exercises, there is no reason at all why your diastasis recti won't heal. Just make sure you do the right exercises. Again, I know I hammer this point home a lot, but it's important. Don't follow random YouTube people, don't do random videos. Don't go onto the health postnatal body YouTube channel and start selecting random exercises. That is not how it works. You need to get from A to B. So follow a program. Another little thing I heard because like I said, I'm blasting through this a little bit. So I'm not gonna spend more time on the healthcare professional is wrong sort of thing here. They just are. And if anyone wants to get in touch peter@healthypostnatalbody.com, if want to say that I'm wrong, get in touch [06:51 inaudible] on the podcast. We'll talk it out. 

 

Another thing that I heard this week, because this is quite an important one. Arom a nurse, a district nurse. So again, not really someone but from a nurse. So not someone that deals with this all the time. She said, and I quote, let me see if I can find this because I copied and pasted it. "Diastasis Recti is for life. It's a lifelong condition. So you can heal it, but then you need to manage it for the rest of your life otherwise it will come back." Yeah, that is not how any of this works. It's improvable, but not fully fixable. That's nonsense. It's completely fixable. This lady doesn't know what she's talking about. The [07:50 inaudible] for life it's improvable, but not fully fixable. It took me at least six months of [07:54 inaudible] to see any difference in my stomach. Yeah because you did it wrong. 

 

And of course it's completely fixable. It's an injury. Diastasis recti is an injury. It is that simple. And injuries, once you're recovered from the injuries, it's not an injury anymore. If I break my leg and that heals and the leg is healed, my leg isn't still broken forever. It's just not true. It's exhausting to hear people say these things. The phrasing of this stuff matters. You could well, always have a weakness, not from diastasis recti? Once it's heal, it's healed. Once your muscular imbalance is healed and your muscles are functioning properly and the gap is recovered and all that sort of stuff, your Diastasis recti is fixed. 

 

Does that mean you will never have core problems again? No, but that would be a new injury. I've always said this. If for instance, you give birth to one baby and then you recover properly include, so your gap heals and your muscle functionality returns to normal and then you have another baby, then you could have diastasis recti again. Sure. But that's not the same diastasis recti. That is different. This is why I come across an awful lot of people that had, I don't know above naval diastasis recti after the birth of their first kid. And after the birth of the second they had below naval. They're two different forms of diastasis rector, or you could have completely open diastasis recti. 

 

If you don't know what the difference is, just have a look on the healthy postnatal body website and that'll be fairly clear as to what the difference is. That will show you the different kinds of diastasis recti there are. There's tons of pictures up on the website and just go to the blog section, they'll be up there. I think it might be on the front page. Let me have a quick peekaboo whilst I'm very unprofessionally, just enter that. 

 

Yeah there are different variations of diastasis recti. It is on the front page. There's a little image that shows you four different kinds. Under the header what we can help with. So go there and you have a look and you see, ah, that's the one I've got, it's different forms of diastasis recti. So yeah that would be a new case of diastasis rector. And this lady is massively wrong. And again, it would really help if people would stop saying stuff like that, just stop listening to random people. Can we take that as the message from today's little podcast? Stop listening to random people and it'll get a lot easier. Talking about things that we should probably stop doing. Can we stop doing 21 day challenges to help heal diastasis recti? I like a good challenge. I do. Well, I do. I like these motivational challenges where they basically say these are the exercises that we'll follow and we'll do 5 or 10 minutes or 20 minutes every day. 

 

But you don't do them for rehab. Doing challenges for rehab exercise doesn't work. A 21 day challenge is nowhere near enough. Doing exercises for 21 days is nowhere near enough to make a massive impact into your diastasis recti. I always say that it takes three weeks before you start to feel any results with regards to diastasis recti, as in your stomach starts to tighten up a little bit. Doesn't mean your gap will be significantly smaller after three weeks. It just means that your muscle functionality will be better. And of course, diastasis recti, the width of the gap, the depth of the gap and muscle functionality. So arguably it is the most important thing that you start to feel after three weeks, but 21 days is nowhere near enough to actually heal it. 

 

So if you could stop doing challenges that have a definitive endpoint, they say, do this for 21 days and you feel great. Yeah, but you won't feel great after 21 days. And then all of a sudden you think your diastasis recti can't be healed. And you're like, that idiot said that it's a lifelong condition because yours didn't heal within 21 days. There's a reason good postpartum programs take longer than that. I would argue. I mean, even the bad postpartum programs take three months. And I think there's a lot more to it than just the three months, which is why HPMB takes longer. Why you get three months free and that helps heal most of your diastasis recti but then you usually have other issues to address. 

 

For some people, it can take longer than three months to recover. But you need to commit at least three months to it. And there needs to be a progression in it. So you cannot do the same exercises three months, unexpected to heal. And even if that means doing the same exercises but for more repetition. So on day one, you start with 5 reps and week 2 you're on 10 reps and week 3 you're on 15 or whatever. You need to introduce different exercises, which is why a good postpartum program changes every four weeks. There's a new segment every four weeks. There's no point changing every week. But every three or four weeks, you can definitely start mixing it up to add the progression that you need to add for the muscles to truly recover. 

 

So there's no point doing 21 day challenges. So please stop doing them. Unless you're part of like a motivational group and you say, okay, I have my own fitness program. Our motivation is to exercise every day for X amount of days. That's fine. Because then you can say, I've exercised 21 days in a row. Amazing. I'm fantastic. And then I'm onto the next stretch and all that sort of stuff. That is completely fine. But you cannot just do a diastasis recti challenge and hope you get the results after 21 days, that is just not ever going to work and will only ever end with you feeling disappointed and all that sort of stuff.

So please stop doing that. 

 

Just take your time with this stuff. There is no rush when it comes to healing diastasis recti. It doesn't need to be done in three weeks. You were pregnant for nine. Like you might have been walking around with it for years. So why all of a sudden the rush to get it fixed in three weeks, it just makes no sense whatsoever. Take your time with it. Follow a good program, make sure you do the exercise properly. And you follow the progressions. You commit three months, maybe a bit longer to it, depending on what you need. That doesn't mean that, in case of healthy postnatal body of course I give everybody three months completely free access. But it doesn't mean you can't copy and paste the session plans for the first three months and take your time with it.

 

If you don't wanna pay, that's fine. You get three months free access. You copy and paste the session plans. You subscribe to the YouTube channel and you look stuff up. It doesn't mean you need to be a member for a long time. It just means you need to commit more time. That's a difference. 

 

Anyway, that's the podcast for today. There's no in the news this week, because there was no news this week. That's even remotely interesting. Like I said, I had other stuff on this week. So you get a 20 minute podcast this week. For the first time ever I'm not making half an hour. But on the plus side you've got a couple hour and a half podcasts coming up on next few weeks. So it's maybe nice to have a short one in there and you have a tremendous week. You take care of yourself and I'll be back next week. Take care. Bye now.