Battle of the post-baby bulge

[attach]2736[/attach]Definition, mummy tummy:

That poochy flabby tummy that won’t go away after childbirth.

Solution to mummy tummy:

Ramp it up with a couple thousand crunches a day in between baby feedings and the fat will burn right off.

Wrong and wrong, say the experts.

Mummy tummy, technically called diastasis recti, isn’t what most people think it is.

“It’s not just flab,” says Kim Vopini, mother of two and fitness expert for moms and moms-to-be at Mothers Core Fitness.

As Vopini puts it, mummy tummy is abdominal contents that aren’t supported. During pregnancy, the two strap abdominal muscles, known as the six-pack muscles, separate due to the strain on the connective tissue holding them together.

Abdominal crunches, or any sort of forward-forceful movement, will only put more pressure on the connective tissue and possibly make mummy tummy worse, she says.

Vopini focuses on strengthening the pelvic floor and the deep abdominal muscles called the transversus abdominis.

“They’re not talked about before or even after pregnancy,” she says.

Samantha Montpetit-Huynh agrees there’s a lot of confusion surrounding the causes of and treatment for mummy tummy. She teaches an Ab Rehab program through her pre- and post-natal personal training programs business, Core Expectations.

Moms have come to her having been told their muscles have split or torn when they really haven’t she says, and that the only option to repair the damage is a $10,000 operation (basically a tummy tuck).

The trick to non-surgically dealing with the problem, she says, is to focus on those deep abdominal muscles and do exercises that feel like you’re pulling your bellybutton toward your spine. That activity encourages those six-pack muscles to close.

But the program is called rehab for a reason.

Montpetit-Huynh admits it’s tedious, boring and intensive, involving hundreds and up to thousands of reps a day that must be spaced apart in order to be effective.

“This is a really, really hard program to do.”

But it can be done with results showing within three months to a year, and the sooner you start, the more effective the exercises will be, she says.

Being fit pre-pregnancy, of course, can have its advantages. Thirty-two year old Lindsay Greisman worked out with a personal trainer a couple times a week before getting pregnant.

The first-time mom says that she was mentally prepared for the changes she’d see in her body, but admits to panicking when she went clothes shopping six to eight weeks after giving birth.

“I had a moment in the change room,” she admits. But that moment only served to motivate her to get back to her personal trainer.

Her mummy tummy is gone now, but she says she had to work at it with a trainer focusing specifically on her abs.

[attach]2737[/attach]Although Vopini says it’s not always about how fit you are going in, the severity of mummy tummy can be reduced if you are already working those muscles.

She teaches various prevention exercises to improve muscle strength, such as pelvic floor contractions (the best way to describe one is to imagine the feeling of stopping flow of urine).

Though Julie Watson of AfterGlow Health & Fitness says getting rid of mummy tummy is the number one concern for mothers, she cautions moms against being too vigilant.

“It’s a ridiculous expectation,” she says of the flat mummy tummy phenomena popularized by society and celebrities.

“You’ve got to have perspective as a new mom,” she says. “You cannot expect miracles overnight.”

Speaking of perspective, Montpetit-Huynh advocates an old tradition your mother or grandmother may be familiar with, that of splinting.

Splinting should be done soon after birth and kept on until the gap closes, she says. There are special wraps that can be bought that wrap all the way around the belly and back and hold the tummy in.

“When you splint you bring those muscles back together.”

The muscles will respond better to the exercises when they’re in the right place, she says.

“Think of it as casting,” she says. “Instead of knitting the bone together you’re knitting the muscles together.”

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