A client came to me not long ago genuinely frightened. She’d been told she had “a gap.” Two fingers wide. She said it like a diagnosis of something terminal.
She’d already booked a package of ab treatments at a salon — the kind where you lie down, they attach pads to your stomach, and a machine makes your muscles contract for you. Twenty minutes, no effort, and supposedly a flatter, stronger core at the end of it.
She wanted to know if she should keep going, or whether she’d ruined her body permanently.
Neither, as it turned out. So let’s talk about both halves of that.
What diastasis recti actually is
During pregnancy, your growing baby needs room. So the connective tissue running down the middle of your abdominals — the linea alba — softens and stretches, and your abdominal muscles move apart to make space.
That’s diastasis recti. It isn’t a tear. It isn’t damage. It’s your body doing exactly what it’s designed to do.
Which is why it happens to almost everyone. By the end of pregnancy, some degree of separation is close to universal. It’s the standard outcome of growing a human, not a sign that something went wrong.
For most women, it narrows substantially in the months after birth, on its own. And for many of those where some separation remains, it causes no problems at all.
The gap is not the point
Here’s the bit that gets lost, and it’s the bit that stops the fear.
Everyone fixates on width — one finger, two, three. But the width of the gap matters far less than what the tissue does. Can it generate tension? Can your deep core manage pressure when you lift, cough, laugh, or stand up holding a toddler?
You can have a narrow gap that functions poorly. You can have a wider gap that functions beautifully. The number isn’t the story — and chasing “closing the gap” as the goal sends women down months of the wrong road.
What you’re actually rebuilding is function: a core that coordinates, holds tension, and supports you in real life.
Why a machine can’t do this for you
Which brings us back to my client’s salon package.
Those treatments work by making a muscle contract passively. And to be fair, the muscle really does contract — you can feel it. That’s why it’s persuasive.
But contraction isn’t the thing that’s missing postpartum. Coordination is.
What your core needs to relearn is timing: your breath, your pelvic floor, and your deep abdominals working together, at the right moment, under real load. Bracing before you lift the car seat. Managing pressure as you stand up from the floor. Not letting everything bulge outward when you exert yourself.
No electrode can teach that. A machine can twitch a muscle; it can’t teach your body when and how to use it — and it definitely can’t do it while you’re carrying a toddler up a flight of stairs, which is where you actually need it.
That’s the whole difference. Passive stimulation is something done to you. Rehab is something you learn to do.
I say this from my own experience too — not with separation, but with pelvic floor issues after my first. What eventually helped wasn’t anything passive or quick. It was learning how to use my body again, properly, in the right order, over time.
What actually helps
- Start with breath and pressure. Rebuilding the connection between your diaphragm, deep core, and pelvic floor is the foundation. It looks like almost nothing. It changes everything.
- Get assessed by someone qualified. A registered women’s health or pelvic floor physiotherapist can tell you what your tissue is actually doing — not just how many fingers fit in a gap. That’s a clinician with specific pelvic health training, not a salon package. (Not sure where to start? I keep a list of trusted practitioners we refer to.)
- Load progressively. Your core gets stronger the same way every other muscle does: by being challenged gradually over time. Avoiding all effort forever isn’t protection, it’s just deconditioning.
- Watch how you move, not just what you do. Coning or doming down the middle when you exert yourself is useful information — it means the load or the strategy needs adjusting, not that you’re broken.
- Give it real time. Months, not weeks. This is tissue and coordination, and neither is in a hurry.
You don’t need to be scared
If you take one thing from this: a separation is not a wound, and you are not broken.
Most women improve enormously with the right approach. Surgery is rarely the answer, and it isn’t the starting point. And the flat stomach that the salon advert is quietly selling you? That was never the real goal anyway.
The goal is a core you can trust — one that holds you steady through the school run, the grocery haul, the toddler on your hip, and the long, unglamorous, wonderfully ordinary business of your life.
That, you build. Nobody can plug it in for you.
If this resonates, the first chapter of my book — Strength Through the Messy & Beyond — is free to read right now. It’s an honest look at why so much fitness advice was never built for the reality of women’s lives, postpartum most of all.
Daniëlle van der Leest
Women’s Strength & Wellbeing Coach | Founder of ActiveWomen | Mum of 3
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