How Glute Exercises Can Help Heal Your Diastasis

One of the most underlooked components in healing diastasis recti is developing glute strength.

We focus a lot on core and breathing techniques for healing diastasis recti, which is super important, but developing glute strength is going to have a huge hand in the effectiveness of those core & breathing exercises. Which in turn will help heal diastasis!

Here’s why.

Strong glutes help stabilize the pelvis and movement around the hip area.

Which means that when we have strong glutes, we have better posture.

And posture is an all day long kind of thing. Like even when we’re not consciously thinking about our breathing or recovery exercises.

Better posture means better alignment of the ribs and hips (all day long). We want the ribs to be stacked over the hips.

When the ribs are stacked over the hips, our diaphragm and pelvic floor are also going to be in proper alignment.

So then when we get into those breathing techniques, our diaphragm and pelvic floor are able to synch up properly, which makes our breathing effective. We are now in a position that helps manage pressure in our core and pelvic floor, which helps heal diastasis and pelvic floor dysfunctions like incontinence and prolapse.

It’s important to note here that it’s probably easy to keep proper alignment and posture while you’re actually performing recovery exercises, but that’s only a fraction of your day! That glute strength is going to help you keep better posture throughout the other 23+ hours of the day, which will have a much more significant impact on your overall recovery.

SO, what happens if you don’t first have proper alignment?

If your ribs are flared and hips tilted forward (aka improper alignment) when you perform breathing exercises, the pressure will increase at the midline of our core and pelvic floor. Which would not only make your breathing exercises ineffective, but actually somewhat counterintuitive to your recovery.

That extra pressure on that midline is going to make it a lot harder to heal diastasis and any pelvic floor dysfunction. We are trying to bring those ab muscles back together, in a sense, not push them further apart (which is what that added pressure would do).

This is why including glute exercises in your early postpartum recovery is going to be key for healing diastasis and pelvic floor symptoms!

Some of my favorite glute-building-for-diastasis recti exercises to start with (weeks 1-6) include:

• Body weight squats
• Body weight box squats
• Glute bridges
• Glute bridge holds
• Frog pumps
• Kneeling glute pumps
• Lunges (reverse, forward, curtsy)

Then once you’re at a point to start adding weight (weeks 6+), a few favorite glute exercises include:

• DB/BB hip thrusts
• Goblet squats
• DB step ups
• BB front/back squats

These movements will be key for your strongest recovery!

That’s why glute exercises are included 3x/week in your early recovery workouts in the FIGR:Postpartum program. I also make sure you continue to focus on glute strength as we build back to the weights in the later weeks of the program!

Glute strength can make such a huge impact on diastasis, pelvic floor symptoms and your postpartum recovery overall – it’s simply a can’t miss.

To achieve your safest and strongest postpartum recovery, subscribe to my 3 month postpartum recovery plan for those first 3 months – details can be found here!

I got you,

Katelyn