As I continue my personal journey back to wellness I hit a snag. It’s a bit embarassing, but, in the interest of full disclosure about my journey, I’m spilling all the beans and possibly my guts in the process.
I’ve been diagnosed with a condition known as diastasis recti.
For the past couple of years I’ve noticed as I did crunches and other abdominal exercises that the area between my abs in the centerline of my stomach would bulge out as I lifted up and the intra-abdominal pressure increased. It looked pretty freaky, like when the baby Aliens matured and punched or ate their way out of a host’s stomach. The situation worried me although I tried my best to ignore it. I always wore a shirt when I did crunches and wouldn’t do them around other people at the gym.
My wife recently looked it up on the ‘Net. Apparently, it’s pretty common and not extremely dangerous. Best of all, it’s correctable. Here’ s the embarrasing part- it most often happens among pregnant women and kids. In other words, I have a girly injury. Next thing you know, I’ll be walking around telling people that my vagina hurts.
A diastasis recti is a seperation of the abdominis recti muscle into left and right halves. The linea alba, a connective tissue that holds the muscles together under normal conditions has either torn at some point in my life or was barely existent in the first place. Because of the seperation, my internal organs push out between the ab recti muscles when I strain.
My wife found a nurse in NY named Julie Tupler, who is the world authority on the condition. The correction techniques are actually named after her. She says it’s slowly correctable and has a series of exercises that I can do that will slowly allow the linea to rejoin. So for now, it looks like my old ab workout will be changing dramatically. I’ll be doing exercises usually prescribed for pregnant women and crunches are now off the table as a core exercise. If I continue to do the exercises that make it pop out, It’ll set back any progress I make to fix it. I even tried the new myostatic crunch shown in Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Body and even that makes it worse.
Just a small setback, but I’m not going to let this slow me down any. The new lifestyle change is going well, and I’m still excited about the progress I’m making. Till next time…
Mastering the Art of Living 
Keep up the good work! 😀
Via Facebook- “I will pray that you behave so it will heal!! Is it the same as a hernia?” Rita B.
The literature says that there’s a possibility that my gut could get caught between the muscles if I strain too much and can cause a hernia that way.