If you’ve landed on this post, chances are you’ve either just been told you have a diastasis recti, or you’re postpartum and trying to figure out where on earth to begin. Either way, before we get into the how, let’s talk about the what because there’s a lot of fear and misinformation out there and it’s doing women a disservice.

Let’s reframe diastasis recti entirely

A diastasis recti (DR) is a separation of the two sides of the rectus abdominis.  the “six-pack” muscle, at the midline. During pregnancy as the uterus expands, the linea alba (the connective tissue running down the centre of your abdomen) stretches to accommodate your growing baby. This is not a bad thing. It is not damaging your core. It is your body doing exactly what it’s designed to do.

A diastasis is a necessary adaptation to pregnancy, and yet somehow it’s become one of the most feared diagnoses in the postpartum space. Women are handed lists of exercises to avoid, told their core is ‘broken,’ or sent home from a 6 week check feeling like they need to tiptoe around their own body. This framing is unhelpful and, frankly, inaccurate.

Not every gap is a diastasis

I see this regularly with my clients: a woman comes to me having been told she has a diastasis, anxious and unsure how to move, but when assessed the ‘gap’ is somewhere between 1 and 2 cm. By definition, this does not meet the threshold for diastasis recti.

The commonly used threshold for a true diastasis is a gap of greater than 2–2.5 cm (or roughly two finger-widths) at the level of the umbilicus. A small amount of separation is entirely normal, even in women who have never been pregnant. If your gap is sitting at 1.5 cm and you’re functioning well, that is not something that requires intensive intervention or fearful avoidance of movement.

Width vs. depth: what actually matters

Here’s where it gets interesting, and where many online voices miss a crucial point.

There is ongoing debate in the research world about whether the width of the gap is actually the most important measure and increasingly, the evidence suggests it isn’t. What arguably matters more is the tension and function of the linea alba: its ability to transmit load, generate tension and support the system under pressure.

This is where depth comes in. You can have a relatively wide gap that has good tension and transfers force well. This would be someone who manages intra-abdominal pressure effectively, breathes well and has a system that’s loading and adapting. And you can have a narrower gap that has poor tension, where the tissue feels like has no resistance when assessed, a linea alba that isn’t doing its job.

What the depth (or lack of tension/resistance) is telling us is that the tissue isn’t yet able to transfer force efficiently. It’s a window into the function of the system, not just the structure. This is why my programming does not fixate solely on closing the gap. I am more interested in restoring the function of the whole core canister: the breath, the pressure management the load distribution.

Chasing a narrower gap through an overuse of targeted core rehab exercises, rather than a full body approach, may not give you function. In fact, the pattern I see most often with clients coming to me for 1:1 training is that they are overthinking their core work entirely.

They arrive having been cued to “zip up from the bottom” for every single exercise because let’s be honest, this cue is everywhere on social media right now and the problem isn’t the cue itself. It’s that it’s being handed out without any of the foundations underneath it. Nobody has taught them how to manage pressure, how to breathe, or how to find a neutral position first. So what it produces instead is a constant clenching and lifting of the pelvic floor, or gripping through the upper abdominals. Sometimes both. The system is braced, held and effortful, which is the opposite of what we’re looking for.

The frustrating part is that this is often happening before the more fundamental questions have been answered. Can she actually expand into her rib cage when she breathes? Not just the belly rising, but a genuine lateral and posterior expansion? And when it comes to positioning, can she quietly hold a rib-pelvis stack without recruiting full body tension to get there? If the answer to either of those is no, then layering more core exercise on top is not the solution. We need to go back further to better manage intra-abdominal pressure.

This is why the foundation matters so much. Restoring breathing mechanics, alignment and whole system coordination very often does and the gap frequently responds as a byproduct.

So what does this look like with your workouts?

Step 1: The foundation of diastasis recovery

With all of that context in place, let’s talk about where to actually begin. And the answer, perhaps surprisingly, is not with a list of abdominal exercises.

Posterior and lateral rib expansion

The first thing I teach every woman I work with, regardless of whether she has a diastasis or not, is how to breathe properly, specifically, how to expand into the back and sides of the rib cage.

Most of us breathe predominantly into the front of the chest or the belly. This pattern affects the way the diaphragm descends, how the pelvic floor responds and how intra-abdominal pressure is managed. A shallow, belly dominant breathing pattern creates a system that is constantly loaded in one direction.

Learning to breathe posteriorly and laterally, to feel the ribs expand outwards and backwards on the inhale, changes the relationship between the diaphragm, the deep abdominals and the pelvic floor. It’s the foundation everything else is built on.

Two of my favourite ways to teach this:

Rockback breathing

Start in an all fours position and sit your hips back towards your heels, not necessarily all the way to a full child’s pose, but enough that the lower back begins to round and the posterior rib cage is opened up. From here, take a slow inhale and direct your breath into your back. You’re looking for a feeling of expansion behind you: the ribs widening outwards and pressing into the back of the room, not the chest lifting. This position makes posterior expansion almost unavoidable, which is exactly why it works so well as a starting point. Many women feel it properly for the first time here. The hips-back position reduces the tendency to default to chest breathing and the rounded lower back gives you immediate feedback as you can feel when the breath is landing in the right place. I also like to add in a pilates ball (or pillow if earlier postpartum) to the front side to further restrict breath moving here.

Side lying breathing with a rib smash and forward reach

Lie on your side with your knees slightly bent and place a Pilates ball directly under the ribs of your bottom side, the side you’re lying on. The ball acts as a block, restricting expansion into the ground and closing off that side of the rib cage. With movement limited below, the breath has nowhere to go but up and outwards through the top side ribs. You’re creating a deliberate restriction in order to emphasise lateral expansion on the side facing the ceiling.

From here, reach your top arm forward. The forward reach is there to engage the serratus anterior, which wraps the rib cage and helps draw the ribs down and around. Think of it less as a stretch and more as an active anchoring. The serratus has a direct relationship with rib position, and when it engages through the reach, you get a much better organised surface for the breath to expand against. The ribs are wrapping rather than flaring and the lateral expansion you’re looking for becomes far more targeted and meaningful.

You should feel the top ribs fanning outwards as the breath lands. Lie on each side and you’ll often notice a difference between the two, one will expand more freely than the other and that asymmetry is useful information in itself.

Finding your rib stack

Closely related to breath is alignment. Specifically, getting the ribs stacked over the pelvis. This sounds simple, but for most postpartum women it requires a genuine relearning, because pregnancy changes your posture in a very particular way and your body doesn’t automatically reset once the baby arrives.

During pregnancy, as the belly grows and the centre of gravity shifts forward, most women move into an anterior pelvic tilt. The pelvis tips forward, the lower back arches, and the rib cage lifts and flares out in front to counterbalance. This is a normal, adaptive response to carrying a growing baby. After birth, many women simply stay there. The baby is out, but the postural habits remain.

Rib flare is worth understanding in this context. When the ribs are lifted and flared forward rather than sitting down and over the pelvis, the resting tension through the abdominal wall is altered. The linea alba is under a different kind of load, the diaphragm is in a compromised position, and the deep core simply cannot organise itself effectively from that starting point. You can do all the core exercises you like from a flared rib position and you will be working around the problem rather than addressing it.

The goal is to find what we call a rib over pelvis stack, with the ribs dropping down and sitting directly over the pelvis vs thrusting forward. But here’s the important nuance: we’re not looking for a dramatic correction, a posterior pelvic tuck, or a rigid posture. We’re looking for the ability to find that position quietly, without gripping, without bracing, without tension through the whole body just to hold it. If you have to work hard to maintain a neutral stack, that tells us something. The system isn’t yet able to organise passively, which means we have more work to do on the foundations before layering movement on top.

Getting familiar with what your posture actually looks like now, where your pelvis sits, where your ribs are, whether you’re still carrying the shape of pregnancy in your body, is genuinely useful self knowledge.

One of my favourite ways to introduce the rib stack without any effort or conscious correction is the 90/90 position. Lie on your back with your feet flat on the wall and your hips and knees at 90 degrees. That’s it. The set up does the work for you.

90/90 Breathing

What I love about this position is that it places the ribs directly over the pelvis almost automatically. There’s no gripping, no trying to correct, no mental checklist. The floor supports you, the wall supports your legs, and your body simply settles into the alignment we’re looking for. For women who have been trying to find a neutral stack and struggling, this is often the moment it clicks, because they can finally feel it without having to force it.

From that organised starting position, breath travels differently. With the ribs sitting where they should be, the inhale can expand outwards into the rib cage and downwards towards the pelvic floor much more freely than it can from a flared or anterior position. This is also where I have found it easiest to cue 360 degree breathing, that sense of expansion in all directions, front, back, sides and down, because the body is already in the right shape to receive it. You’re not fighting your own posture to get the breath where it needs to go.

Tips of finding a rib pelvis stack in quadruped

Involving the adductors and hamstrings

This is the part that surprises most people, but the inner thighs have a genuine relationship with the pelvic floor and deep core. The adductors connect into the pubic bone, and when they engage they create a gentle increase in tension through the pelvic floor and deep system without any conscious bracing or gripping required. This is exactly why they’re such a useful tool. Instead of cueing someone to zip up, suck in, or brace their abdominals, a gentle adductor squeeze can quietly switch on the deep system in a way that feels natural and doesn’t create the excessive tension or held breath patterns we’re trying to move away from. It’s a back door into core activation, and for many women it’s the first time they’ve felt their deep system working without overthinking it.

The hamstrings are equally relevant, though for a slightly different reason. The proximal hamstrings, where they attach at the sitting bones, have an influence over pelvic position. When they are engaged and lengthened appropriately they encourage a more neutral pelvis, which in turn makes it easier to find and maintain that rib-pelvis stack we talked about earlier. For women who are still sitting in an anterior tilt postpartum, this connection is particularly worth understanding as you’re influencing the whole positional foundation.

When we pair the two together, something interesting happens. The adductors bring the deep system online, the hamstrings help organise the pelvis and the body finds a more natural alignment to breathe and load from. The exercises in the next section use exactly this combination, with the 90/90 position doing a lot of the set up work so neither muscle group has to be consciously recruited from scratch.

90/90 hamstring bridge with diagonal band pull

Feet flat on the wall, hips at 90 degrees. Loop a light resistance band around your left foot and hold the other end in your right hand. From here, drive through your feet to lift into a hamstring bridge and hold. On your exhale, pull the band diagonally across the body. The hamstrings are working through the drive, the breath is anchoring the position and the band is asking the system to stay organised under a light load. Keep the pelvis level throughout. If you feel the ribs flaring or the lower back overworking, reduce the band tension.

90/90 single leg bridge with block squeeze and reach

Same starting position, feet on the wall. Place a block between your knees, then lift one foot away from the wall so that leg moves into hip flexion. You now have one foot on the wall driving the bridge and the opposite leg floating, held at 90 degrees. Squeeze the block gently with both knees to bring the adductors in, then reach both arms directly over your chest as you exhale. The reach is deliberate. Just as with the side lying breathing, the forward reach engages the serratus anterior, wrapping the ribs down and preventing them from flaring as the bridge loads. It’s a lot happening at once, in a quiet and controlled way.

Dynamic short lever Copenhagen plank off a yoga block

This one is for the adductors in a more isolated sense. Set up side lying with a yoga block in front of you. Your top knee presses down into the block, and that press is what lifts your hips. Your bottom leg is either resting lightly on the floor for support or held in 90 degrees of hip flexion if you want the additional challenge. The range of motion is short and controlled. You’re not looking for a full side plank. You’re looking for a small, deliberate lift driven entirely by the top inner thigh pressing into the block, then a controlled lower. The short lever and the block make this genuinely accessible in early recovery while still giving the adductors meaningful work. It’s one of those exercises that looks very modest and feels surprisingly effective.

Rib mobility

If the ribs aren’t moving well, everything upstream and downstream is affected. Restricted thoracic mobility limits the lateral and posterior expansion we’re looking for with breath, changes how the diaphragm can function, and affects how load transfers through the trunk. It’s often a missing piece in diastasis recovery programmes that jump straight to core exercises, and it’s worth giving it proper attention.

Two of my favourite ways to work into thoracic rotation:

Thoracic rotation in heel sit with band

Sit back onto your heels and loop a light resistance band around your upper back and shoulder on the side furthest from the anchor point, with the band fixed low to your side. From here, rotate your upper body towards the anchor, letting the band guide and encourage the movement rather than resist it. The low anchor point keeps the pull coming from below, which drives the rotation through the thoracic spine rather than the shoulder. It’s a surprisingly effective way to find rotation in an area that tends to be very stuck, particularly after months of feeding, carrying, and sleeping in positions that don’t ask much of the upper back.

Thread the needle with overhead reach and foam roller

Start in a four point kneeling position with a foam roller on the ground beside you. Take one arm overhead and rest the other lightly on the roller. From here, thread the overhead arm down and through, rotating through the upper back and following the movement with your eyes. The foam roller under the lower arm acts as a guide, encouraging you to sink further into the rotation rather than compensating through the lower back or shoulder. The overhead reach creates length through the side of the body as you rotate, so you’re getting thoracic mobility and a little lateral opening simultaneously.

Skin rolling and upper abdominal release

For many women, particularly those who have been gripping through the upper abdominals or holding tension below the sternum, the fascia in this area becomes restricted and dense. That restriction feeds directly into the patterns we’re trying to change. You cannot breathe well into a rib cage that has tight, unyielding tissue wrapped around it.

Skin rolling is a simple and accessible way to begin addressing this. In a kneeling position sat back on your heels, use your fingers and thumbs to pick up a small fold of skin across the upper abdomen and around the rib cage and slowly roll it between your fingers, working your way across the area.

When you find a particularly resistant area, try holding there and breathing into it. Direct your breath into the spot where your hands are and feel whether the tissue starts to soften and respond. It’s a combination of mechanical release and breath work in a very targeted way, and for some women it produces a noticeable shift in how freely they can expand into the rib cage immediately afterwards. A great tool to incorporate at the start of your session.

Where to go from here

Diastasis recti recovery doesn’t have to be a minefield, and it doesn’t have to be something you hyper-focus on. The women who make the most progress are rarely the ones doing the most core exercises. They’re the ones who slowed down long enough to address the foundations first.

Can you breathe into the back and sides of your rib cage? Can you find a rib-over-pelvis stack without bracing your whole body to hold it? Is your tissue mobile enough to actually respond to the breath you’re trying to direct into it? These are the questions worth asking before anything else.

What I hope this post has shown is that recovery is not about avoiding movement or obsessing over a gap measurement. It’s about understanding the system you’re working with. The breath, the alignment, the fascia, the adductors, the hamstrings — none of these things exist in isolation, and when you start addressing them together, the body tends to respond in ways that isolated core work simply doesn’t produce.

If you’ve been zipping, sucking in, and gripping your way through your postpartum recovery without much to show for it, this is your invitation to put that down and start somewhere quieter. The exercises and techniques in this post are a genuine starting point.

Work with me

If you’re unsure where you sit with all of this, or you’d like a proper assessment and a program built around what your body actually needs, I’d love to work with you.

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