Healing diastasis recti whilst breastfeeding and a "21 day diastasis challenge!"??

 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! 

As always; HPNB still only has 5 billing cycles.

So this means that you not only get 3 months FREE access, no obligation!

BUT, if you decide you want to do the rest of the program, after only 5 months of paying $10/£8 a month you now get FREE LIFE TIME ACCESS! That's $50 max spend, in case you were wondering.

Though I'm not terribly active on  Instagram and Facebook you can follow us there. I am however active on Threads so find me there!

And, of course, you can always find us on our YouTube channel if you like your podcast in video form :)

Visit healthypostnatalbody.com and get 3 months completely FREE access. No sales, no commitment, no BS.

Email peter@healthypostnatalbody.com if you have any questions, comments or want to suggest a guest/topic

Playing us out this week "Side step" by Cast of Characters

Transcript

Peter: 0:00

Hey, welcome to the Healthy Postnatal Body Podcast with your postnatal expert, peter Lap N, 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 Right? And is diastasis recti for life? Is it forever? Basically, it's one of those episodes you know it's a nice short one. This is diastasis recti. The gift that keeps on giving. actually is more healthcare professionals are 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, relax, hit back. Here we go.

Peter: 1:08

Well, welcome to the Healthy Postnatal Body podcast with little old me, peter Lapp. I am joined today. Oh, this is a podcast for the 14th of April 2024, by the way, I'm here with Bob, with Kitty and with Lola and we're in a bit of a rush. It's going to be a very short one on a subject that I've covered before. It's a from a couple of years ago. I covered it years and years and years ago, um, breastfeeding and diastasis recti. I'm going to make this like I said, I'm going to make this a quick one, because I've got tons of editing to do, of interviews, and I'm I'm behind and I had 11 dogs to play with today and and it is carnage, it is chaos and it is all good and it's all great fun. Peter at HealthyPastNatalBodycom, by the way, if you have any subjects you'd like me to cover, any guests you'd like me to have on and all that sort of stuff, do send me an email. I love getting emails. If you could rate the podcast, let me remind you that that is an option. Hey, let me remind you that that is an option. If you could give us a couple of stars, or five or so, in an ideal world, on Apple and Spotify or wherever you listen, and all that sort of thing, then that would also be much appreciated. So what am I talking about today?

Peter: 2:27

Something I came across when someone's health care professional said this to him. They said, basically, you cannot heal diastasis recti whilst you're still breastfeeding because you've all the hormones in the body. Um, and you know that sort of comment makes me die a little bit. Right, I've spoke about postpartum hormones before, you know relaxin, prolactin and and all that sort of stuff. So I'm not going to go too much, uh, into too much depth. Um, I did point out that prolactin, especially will mean that you'll likely be five to ten 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've 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.

Peter: 3:28

Don't be a bit blunt about it, right, 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 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, it is that simple, it is. This is just not rocket science. It otherwise I wouldn't be able to. I wouldn't be able to do it because I'm an idiot, right? But this is, that is just the way it is. And it baffles me that there are healthcare professionals out there and you know we're talking GPs here, so we're not talking people that really know what they're talking about.

Peter: 5:00

When it comes to diastasis recti on 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 a normal physio that deals with knee and 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 and 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 Healthy 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.

Peter: 6:01

Another little thing I heard because, like I said, I'm blasting through this a little bit so I'm not going to spend more time on. The healthcare professional is wrong sort of thing here. Right, they just are. And if anyone wants to get in touch, peter at healthypostnatalbodycom, if you want to say that I'm wrong, get in touch, I'll have you on the podcast, we'll. We'll talk it out.

Peter: 6:29

Um, and another thing that I heard this week because this is quite an important one from 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, and I quote let me find it, let me see if I can find this, because I copied and pasted it and oh yeah, diastasis recti is for life. It's a lifelong condition, so you need to, 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. 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 ER is for life. It's improvable but not fully fixable. It took me at least six months of heart stroke to see any difference in my stomach. Yeah, because you did it wrong. And of course it's completely fixable. You're just, it's just. Course it's completely fixable. You're just, it's just, it's an injury.

Peter: 7:43

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 is just not true. It's exhausting to hear people say these things. You know the phrasing of this stuff matters.

Peter: 8:18

You could well always have a weakness, not from diastasis recti. Once it's healed, 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 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 Right.

Peter: 9:14

There are two different forms of diastasis recti, 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 will be. That will 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, uh, and just go to the blog section. It'll be up there. I think it might be on the front page. Let me have a. Let me have a quick peekaboo whilst I'm very unprofessionally. Just enter. That is that. Yeah, there's 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 you know. So go there and you have a look and you say, ah, that's the one I've got. It's different forms of diastasis recti. So, yeah, that is.

Peter: 10:15

That would be a new case of diastasis recti 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.

Peter: 10:44

Can we stop doing 21 day challenges to help heal diastasis recti? I like a good challenge, I do, I do. I like these motivational challenges where they basically say these are the exercises we'll follow and we'll do five or ten minutes or 20 minutes every day, but you don't do them for rehab, right, 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.

Peter: 11:25

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. It 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, you know diastasis recti is 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, right? So if you could stop doing challenges that have a definitive end point. 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 that idiot that said that it's a lifelong condition because yours didn't heal within 21 days. Right, there's a reason.

Peter: 12:28

Good postpartum programs, uh, take longer than that, I would argue. I mean, even the bad postpartum programs take three months, right, 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 rectum. But then you usually have other issues to address. For some people it can take longer than 3 months to recover, but you need to commit at least 3 months to it and there needs to be a progression in it. So you cannot do the same exercises 3 months and expect it to heal, and even if that means doing the same exercises but for more repetition. So on day one you start with five reps and week two you're on 10 reps and week three you're on 15 or whatever.

Peter: 13:23

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. A new segment every four weeks. There's no point changing every week, right. 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.

Peter: 13:46

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 on to the next stretch and all that sort of stuff. That is completely fine.

Peter: 14:11

But you cannot just do a diastasis, recti, challenge and hope you get the results after 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, right, 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 3 months, like you were pregnant for 9, like you might have been walking around with it for years, so why, all of a sudden, the rush to get it fixed in 3 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 Plus Natural Body, of course, I give everybody three months completely free access, but it doesn't mean you can't copy-paste the session plans for the first three months and take your time with it. If you don't want to 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 the difference.

Peter: 15:36

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 know you get a 20-minute podcast this week For the first time ever. I'm not making half an hour, but you know, on the plus side you've got a couple hour and a half podcasts coming up in the next few weeks, so it's maybe nice to have a short one in there. You have a tremendous week. You take care of yourself and I'll be back next week. Right, take care.