During pregnancy as your belly grows, your rectus abdominis lengthens and your ribcage shifts position, your pelvic floor carries more sustained load and your breathing mechanics change to accommodate all of it. All of this is normal and necessary but it also changes the relationship between your ribs, your pelvis, and your diaphragm, which is the foundation of how you breathe, brace, and manage pressure through your torso.

Postpartum, many women are left with a rib cage that’s still flared, a diaphragm that isn’t moving through its full range, and a pelvis that isn’t stacked underneath the ribs the way it needs to be. Everything that depends on efficient breathing (pressure management, core coordination, pelvic floor function) is working from a weaker foundation.

This is why so many women struggle with their core strength postpartum. They are doing all the endless core exercises they see online and yet see no progress. It’s rarely a lack of effort. Usually it’s one or more of these 6 things getting missed.

1. You’re Not Breathing Into Your Ribcage in All Directions

During pregnancy, your ribcage flares outward and upward to make room for your growing baby, and your diaphragm’s range of motion becomes more limited. After birth, that shifted rib position doesn’t just correct itself—a lot of women are left breathing primarily into their belly or their chest, because that’s the pattern their body adapted to over nine months.

The problem is that belly breathing and chest breathing on their own only give you part of the picture. Full core function depends on your ribcage expanding in every direction—front, back, and sides—with every breath. If you’re missing that, your diaphragm, deep core, and pelvic floor are never getting the full signal they need to work together.

These drills help encourage breath into both the sides and back of the ribcage, where women struggle the most to get range.

Exercises to try:

• Side-lying breathing with overhead reach: Lying on your side opens the ribcage on the top side and lets gravity assist that lateral expansion, while the overhead reach lengthens the lat and pulls the rib further into range. It’s one of the easiest positions to actually feel the sides of your ribcage move.
  
• Rockback breathing with rib smash: Rocking back toward your heels flexes the spine and gently compresses the ribcage, which helps you inhale into the back of the rib cage. Breathing into the back of the ribcage from here teaches expansion in a direction most women never feel.

2. You’re Gripping Your Upper Abs Instead of Letting Your Breath Do the Work

This one connects directly to point one. When your ribcage isn’t expanding in all directions—including downward—your pelvic floor doesn’t get to lengthen properly on the inhale, which means it struggles to produce a real “bottoms up” contraction on the exhale.

Instead, I commonly see women compensate by actively pulling their ribs down, or sucking in their stomach to manufacture the feeling of an ab contraction. It feels like “engaging your core,” but it’s tension without coordination—the upper abs grip while the rest of the system, including the pelvic floor, gets left out of the conversation.

If you’re holding a lot of tension in your upper abs, this is a great place to start:

• Skin rolling for manual fascia release: Lifting and rolling the skin releases tight superficial fascia and eases nervous system tension held in the skin and connective tissue, breaking up the “stuck” areas that build up around the ribs and diaphragm.

3. You Don’t Have Enough Upper Back Mobility

Rib mobility and thoracic mobility go hand in hand. When your upper back can actually rotate and extend, your ribcage has more room to expand, and your diaphragm has more room to move through its full range. Without that mobility, you’re trying to build full 360 breathing and core coordination inside a ribcage that physically can’t create the space for it.

This is the direct link back to points one and two: limited thoracic mobility restricts rib expansion, which restricts full breathing, which feeds right back into that upper ab gripping pattern.

Exercise to try:

• Thoracic rotation with forearm down: Thoracic rotation from quadruped works because it isolates the mid-back while your hips and lumbar spine stay locked in place, so the rotation has nowhere to come from except the joints you’re actually trying to mobilise. The quadruped position also lets you load one arm into the ground for stability while the other arm reaches through, giving your ribcage room to open on the working side with every rep. Over time, that repeated, controlled range teaches your thoracic spine and the ribs attached to it to rotate and extend freely again, which is exactly the space your diaphragm needs to expand into on a full breath.

4. You Don’t Have a Rib Stack

Your rib stack refers to your ribs sitting directly over your pelvis, rather than flared up and forward or tucked under. This positioning matters for pressure management—it’s what allows the pressure created with each breath and each contraction to move through your core system the way it’s supposed to, instead of leaking out in the wrong direction (think coning, doming, or pressure showing up as pelvic floor symptoms).

A big part of restoring this isn’t just doing the right exercises—it’s building awareness of where your ribs and pelvis actually are in space, so you can find and hold that stacked position under load, not just when someone cues you into it.

A place to start learning and practicing your stack:

• 90/90 breathing with hip lift and serratus reach: Legs up on a bench with ribs stacked over pelvis puts you in the most mechanically advantaged position to breathe 360 degrees. The hip lift teaches you to use your deep core and glutes to posteriorly tilt the pelvis, while the serratus reach trains the muscle that helps hold your rib stack in place once you’re upright and moving.

5. You’re Not Progressing

Your body needs a reason to adapt. Gentle, supported exercises are the right starting point early on, but if you’re still doing the exact same supine, floor-based moves months later, there’s no new demand being placed on your system—so it has no reason to get stronger.

This doesn’t mean rushing into advanced exercises. It means graded exposure: working through different positions and planes of motion over time, so your core learns to manage pressure and load in more than one context. And honestly, a lot of postpartum programs aren’t challenging enough. If you’re still doing beginner-level, supine-only work 4, 5, 6 months in, that’s not playing it safe—that’s a program that stopped progressing you.

Here is how progression should look over time:

• Supine Pallof press with isometric adductor squeeze: Lying down removes the demand of holding your own position against gravity, so you can focus purely on resisting rotation as you press. Squeezing a ball between your knees switches on the adductors, which co-contract with your deep core and pelvic floor — training the whole system to brace together, not just your abs in isolation.
  
• Progressing to tall kneeling pallof press with overhead reach: Tall kneeling removes your legs as a stabiliser, so your core has to control your trunk on its own. Adding the overhead reach increases the lever arm and the rotational demand, which is the natural progression once the supine version feels easy.

6. You’re Isolating Your Ab Work Instead of Looking at the Bigger Picture

Your core doesn’t operate on its own. It’s part of a connected system that includes your adductors, glutes, hips, lats, and upper back — all of which help manage pressure, create stability and transfer force through your trunk. If your only strategy is core specific exercises done in isolation, you’re training a muscle group, not a system.

Real life doesn’t ask your core to work alone. Picking up your toddler, carrying a car seat, reaching into the back seat while twisting — all of it demands your core stabilise while your hips, shoulders and spine are moving through space at the same time.

This is why later stage training should start pairing core work with compound, multi-joint movement — think loaded carries, split-stance presses, or rotational work off one leg — rather than sticking to hooklying marches and dead bugs indefinitely. The goal isn’t to abandon foundational core work, it’s to build on it.

Where to Go From Here

None of this is about doing more for the sake of more. It’s about training the right things, in the right order, and eventually as part of a connected, whole-body system—which is exactly what my Return to Strength program is built around.

Early postpartum sessions are just 15 minutes, and you can start as soon as you’re ready postpartum—yes, as early as your first few weeks. From there, it takes you through six phases, building up in duration (30–45 mins), volume and overall challenge:

• Phase 1 — Foundational & Rehab: deep core, rib mechanics, and the breathing patterns that underpin everything that follows.
• Phase 2 — Rehab & Reconnect: the same foundation, now under more load and in more demanding positions.
• Phase 3 — Early Build: your first real strength phase, with supersets, RPE targets, and progressive loading that treats you like someone who is capable of getting genuinely strong.
• Phase 4 — Progressive Build: 4 training days a week for the first time, with plyometric introductions and loading that reflects how far you’ve come.
• Phase 5 — Strength Integration: a dedicated 4-day split across upper body, lower body, full body, and a glutes and hamstrings day. This is where it starts to feel like serious training.
• Phase 6 — Building Capacity: the final phase. Heavier, more athletic, more demanding, and built on a postpartum foundation that makes it sustainable. This should feel like a strength program, not a rehab program, with a solid postpartum foundation underneath it.

There are also 3 program variations—gym, home, and an advanced barbell track for anyone working toward returning to compound lifts. The original program was always adjustable based on equipment, but the home program now takes the guesswork out entirely, making it even easier to follow.

This version doesn’t stop just as you’re getting started. It carries you all the way into the strength phase of training, where you can really feel the difference a proper foundation makes.

Ready to give it a go? Try the app today, your 1st 7 days are free: JOIN THE APP