The gap gets all the attention. What actually matters is whether the tissue can hold tension — and that is trainable.
Also called: abdominal separation · ab separation · DRA · mummy tummy
Your abdominal wall has two long muscles running down the front, joined in the middle by a band of connective tissue called the linea alba. During pregnancy that band stretches and thins so the muscles can move apart and make room. This is normal and it happens to almost everyone.
After birth, that tissue usually recovers a good deal of its stiffness on its own. Sometimes it stays slack. When it does, the abdominal wall has a harder time transferring force across the middle — and that is what people are describing when they say they feel disconnected, or like their core is not working.
The measurement people fixate on is the width of the gap. It matters far less than you would think. Two people with the same gap can function completely differently, because the question is not how far apart the muscles sit at rest — it is whether the tissue between them can generate tension under load.
People usually notice some combination of:
The first thing is a proper assessment — and not just measuring the gap. I want to see what the tissue does under load: whether it can build tension, where the pressure goes when you exert, and what the rest of you does to compensate.
From there, most of the work is pressure management and progressive loading. How you breathe, how your ribcage moves, and how you brace all change where force travels. Retraining that is usually more productive than any single exercise, and it is why crunches and aggressive ab work often make things look worse rather than better.
The practical half matters just as much. How you get out of bed, lift a car seat, carry a toddler on one hip, cough, and push a stroller up a kerb — those are the loads your abdominal wall actually meets, dozens of times a day. Changing how you do them is often what shifts symptoms.
Working in your own home means we can do that with your furniture, your stairs, your car seat and your baby, rather than approximating it in a clinic.
For many people, yes — function improves substantially with loading and pressure management, and the connective tissue can regain stiffness. Whether the visible gap closes completely varies, and surgery remains an option some people choose. An assessment will give you a realistic picture of your own situation rather than a general one.
No. Connective tissue responds to load at any point, and plenty of people make meaningful progress years or decades postpartum. The tissue may take longer to respond than it would have at three months, but "too late" is not a category that applies here.
Not inherently — it depends on whether you can manage pressure through the movement. If the middle domes or the pressure pushes forward, that exercise is not useful for you yet. The goal is to build back to those movements, not to avoid them permanently.
No. The assessment at your first visit covers this. If something turns up that needs a physician rather than a physical therapist, I will tell you and help you work out where to go next.