Like many women, I’ve had diastasis recti (DR) after all of our seven babies’ births. After our second child was born in 2011, it was so bad that I went to the doctor due to lower back pain and other symptoms. Fortunately, he knew what DR was and was able to diagnose it.

Since then, it’s taken me at least 14 months after each pregnancy to feel fully recovered and get the gap to less than two fingers. So imagine my delight when, just a few days after our seventh baby turned ten months old, I went to check my diastasis recti – and it was already at two fingers!

What Made the Difference?

While I was excited to discover the healing that had taken place in just ten months, I wasn’t totally surprised. I’d been telling my husband for a few months how much better and more recovered I felt this time around. I chalk it up to an activity that I just started doing on a regular basis: swimming.

When I was in high school, we were required to take swimming. I knew it was good for me, but I didn’t like it very much (that’s putting it nicely). It challenged and exhausted me in a way no other form of exercise was capable of doing. Later in life, I was aware of the benefits of swimming, particularly for pregnancy and postpartum, but those dark days of swimming endless laps (and always being one of the slowest swimmers) prevented me from getting back to the pool.

But in spring 2024, when our seventh child was a few months old, I decided I was going to start training for one of my lifelong fitness goals: a sprint triathlon. Alas, that meant I would have to swim. And swim. And swim.

The first few weeks were ugly, not only in terms of how I felt about swimming, but also how I looked in the water. I’ve always been a “sinker”, and as I crawled from one end of the pool to the other, I could feel my lower body sinking deeper and deeper with each lap. And far from helping my lower back, I started to feel some slight lumbar pain after long swims.

One night, after my husband and daughter gave me some charitable but critical feedback on how I looked in the water, it suddenly clicked: I was swimming without properly engaging my core muscles. No wonder it was so hard! And no wonder I looked like I needed to be rescued. My alignment was totally out of whack because I wasn’t swimming from my center.

Sure enough, swimming with an engaged core felt totally different. I felt like I was gliding through the water, and my speed significantly increased. And most importantly, I could feel myself engaging those deep abdominal muscles that are so crucial for healing DR – the transverse abdominis. This is the “corset” musculature that spans from the ribs to the pelvis, which is why it’s often affected by pregnancy. You would think it would be easy to strengthen and train this musculature, but it’s surprisingly difficult to isolate these deeper layers of your core.

A Whole-Body Exercise

As many online experts who specialize in DR will reiterate (see here, here, and here for some examples), healing your core after pregnancy is a whole-body issue. Your core is much more affected by how you sit, stand, walk, and even breathe than it is by a 10-minute diastasis recti recovery workout. But staying mindful of that throughout the day can be difficult.

Practicing good alignment in the water has made it so much easier for me to maintain better posture during the day. This, in turn, lessens the shear on the abdominal wall and helps the abdominal wall heal more quickly. In fact, fixing my alignment in the water by properly using my core felt a lot like it did when alignment expert Katy Bowman fixed my rib flaring habit at a workshop I attended over ten years ago (you can watch that video here to get a sense of what I’m talking about).

If you’re also trying to heal from DR, I highly recommend you add swimming to your weekly routine. I know it’s the secret weapon that has accelerated my healing the seventh time around. And if you’re looking for a plan that is safe for DR and also includes swimming, here’s a 6-week plan I made that is similar to what I did. The PDF has a link to a short DR-friendly workout you can easily do at home.

Happy Swimming! I would love to hear about your own DR healing journey – please drop a comment below and share what has worked for you!