Exercises to Avoid for Diastasis recti

Here are the 10 Exercises to Avoid if you Have Diastasis Recti. You may know the best exercises but do you know the Exercises to Avoid if you Have abdominal separation? Here they are!

Immediately after childbirth, you must avoid intense core abdominal exercises if you have diastasis recti. In this video I show you the Exercises to Avoid for Diastasis recti.

These include crunches, planking, abdominal curls and heavily loaded resistance exercises during your postnatal workouts.

Some trainers promote these exercises to a healthy population. However, these exercises will only increase unwanted strain on your upper and deep abdominal muscles post baby.

This causes them to separate further which impacts on the healing process.

Avoid doing these exercises if you have a diastasis:

1. Sit ups/Crunches
2. Crossover exercises

1. Sit ups or Crunches and Diastasis Recti

You should not be doing any ab exercises like sit-ups, crunches or roll ups. This is because when you are in a back lying position, your shoulders are off the floor and it will be impossible to completely engage your transverse muscles.

Do Crunches Create a Diastasis?

When you do crunches you are putting force on the connective tissue that joins the outer most abdominal muscles (recti muscles). When you are doing a crunch you are making the rectus abdominis or abdominal muscles longer not shorter.

What About Arching Your Back and Flaring Your Ribs

What happens is that when you stretch your connective tissue sideways your ribs are flared. As a result, it is impossible to completely engage your transverse muscle. If you do exercises where you arch your back your ribs will flare.

This includes sports activities such as tennis and golf where there is a forward crossover movement with your upper body is in a shearing movement stretches your connective tissue sideways.