Diastasis Recti, Pelvic Problems, Breathing Issues
Are you struggling with a Diastasis that just won’t heal? Have you tried exercise programs that target the issue, but it didn’t help or worse you injured yourself? Are Kegels doing nothing to stop you from “peezing”? Do you feel like ever since your baby arrived your body just can’t take a deep breath, or you find yourself only able to get air into the top half of your chest? Guess what? All of these seemingly unrelated problems are part of the same issue. Your bones can’t MOVE!
Let’s look at how this works. Muscles move bones and they
always work in pairs. One muscle moves the bone one direction and a second is
required to move it the other direction, so back the way it came. Each muscle
has one job, to move a bone in one direction. This means if a bone doesn’t move
the muscle pairs are fighting with each other rather than working cooperatively
and one is WINNING. One is turned on so strongly that his buddy can’t turn on
enough to make the bone move.
Now let’s look at our abdominals and breathing.
As we can see from this image our muscles are a complicated pattern of multiple layers. The Serratus, Pectorals, Lats and External Intercostal muscles create inhalation by moving our ribs out as the respiratory diaphragm pulls down allowing air to rush into our lungs. While the Obliques and Internal Intercostals plus the Transverse Abdominis create exhalation by moving the bones of our ribcage in towards our midline to help the diaphragm push air out. If our ribs can’t move, we can’t inhale or exhale deeply. If we can’t move our ribs together toward our midline, we can’t bring a diastasis recti together. It will never shrink or strengthen. If we can’t make our pelvic bones move when we engage our pelvic floor, we will never be able to strengthen. We’re stuck!
So why did we get stuck and how do we get MOVING again? Our
body adapted in order to accommodate a third trimester baby. The ribs moved
outward to get out of the way of our growing baby. To do this the inhalation
muscles, such as the serratus muscles in the image, went into a certain amount
of constant contraction.
Meanwhile the muscles of exhalation, pictured in this image, went into release mode to allow for the stretching that needed to take
place across our fronts which also allowed our ribs to stay flared.
It was a perfect adaptation for pregnancy which is why 100%
of women have some amount of diastasis immediately after birth. In other words,
it is normal. It is meant to happen. It is a helpful pattern in pregnancy but
is an unhelpful pattern once you no longer have a human inside of you to carry
around and instead have a human outside of you to carry around. To carry and
care for your wee one you need your core to come back online. This is one of
the reasons why you need to rest, to be horizontal as much of the time as
possible, even while feeding your newborn. Horizontal allows the core to relax
and for some women this will be enough. The ribs will relax. The pelvic floor
will soften and then begin to strengthen again. But for many women rest isn’t
enough. Their bodies will remain frozen in pregnancy adaption. Stuck for the
rest of their lives. This is why I can find this pattern in women decades after
their last birth impacting how they stand and move and breathe.
But why doesn’t the body just go back after it no longer
needs the adaptation? Well imagine working the biceps of your arms 24/7 for 3
or 4 months. You’d look like Pop Eye the Sailor Man with your great big guns.
Simply putting your arm down would do nothing to change the strength you had
built up in that bicep. Would you even be able to put your arm down? Unbending
your arm means relaxing the bicep muscle so its buddy triceps can unbend the
arm. Think how weak triceps would have become after 3 or 4 months of no work.
Another reason our muscles don’t let go can be fascia.
Sometimes fascia has rushed in to help the ribs stay in expansion during
pregnancy. Fascia is an amazing type of tissue with lots of quirks. It can be
either incredibly strong or soft and supple, slidey-glidey or matted and dense.
It rushes in when something in our system needs to be stabilized and sets to
work immobilizing. It also carries messages to the brain just as our nerves do.
Whereas, the nerves carry sensory messages fascia carries emotional messages.
Since fascia is wrapped around every muscle bundle and each individual muscle
fiber it can tell a muscle to stay in tension if there is an emotional
component to the need for tension. When a woman is pushing her baby out, if
there is fear, she may get stuck in inhalation.
Let me explain. When we bear-down we naturally inhale first.
Then when we are at our fullest expansion our diaphragm goes into ejection
mode. The respiratory diaphragm has an interesting feature where it can either
help eject things upward out of us, think coughs and vomit, or it can eject
things downward, as in feces or babies. If we are suddenly afraid during this
process fascia can decide to hold our ribs in bearing down position. Here’s
another quirk fascia has. Once it set, it tends to stay in immobilization mode
until someone outside the body asks it or forces it to let go.
We also use our transverse abdominis, and obliques to move
our babies through our pelvic bones by having them squeeze in and down around
the baby. Our pelvic bones and pelvic floor is another dynamic complex multilayered muscle/bone system. This image gives you a peek at a few of the layers.
Now normally when the muscles of respiration go to work, they are bringing ribs
together at the same time as our pelvic floor is bringing our pelvic bones
together.
But pushing a baby out is a unique situation which is why
some first-time moms have trouble figuring out “how to push”. It is natural and
spontaneous but can feel confusing to the body and even more to the brain
because the brain may sense it as discoordination of a primary function;
breathing. Both the ribs and pelvic bones need to stay in expansion during the
pushing effort. This out of synch pattern can get programmed into the brain and
leave women out of synch for the rest of their lives. To heal from a diastasis
or leakage or prolapse we need to be able to breathe correctly. To breathe
correctly we need to be able to move our bones together and apart in correct
synch with our breath.
And finally, our old friend fascia is often helping our
rectus abdominis stay in this open diamond pattern by sticking them down to
surrounding tissues. While this is supportive when the abs need to stay in this
awkward constant spread, it is working against your efforts to bring your
muscles back into perpendicular lines. When it comes to holding, our fascia is
stronger than our muscles. That means no amount of exercise by you will budge
or coax or break that fascial grip on your muscle bundles.
So, what’s a woman to do if she thinks this could be her
story? Most traditional cultures have a person skilled in “closing bones” after
birth. It is woven into the fabric of their postpartum care. Unfortunately, in
the U.S. this art has almost been lost. Closing the bones goes beyond making
sure the bones are balanced, as in a chiropractic adjustment. It requires being
able to sense into muscle tension patterns, fascial restrictions, left over
emotions, and how all of this is affecting a woman’s breathing pattern. Once
the bones are closed, balanced and moving, and the fascia has been made to
loosen its grip, work can begin to retrain the brain in a correct breathing
pattern. Finally, she is ready to experiment with how to correctly engage her
abdominals and pelvic floor to re-engage the muscles that turned off so she can
use her muscles in correct balance and coordination. This is what I do as a Certified Birth Healing Specialist at Moving Toward Ease.
Call Jennifer Stover
Founder of Moving Toward Ease
(805)459-8145
