DANI: Hey, it’s Katy Says, I’m Dani, I’ve got Katy here on the other line.
KATY: Hi!
DANI: What’s up today?
KATY: Ooh, not much. The weather?
DANI: The weather’s up?
KATY: The weather is up? Actually, it’s beautiful. Never mind. The weather isn’t even up. Nothing’s up. Just, um, my spirits.
DANI: Just a busy gal.
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: Busy gal, doing her thing, spreading the word.
KATY: Lucky to be doing so.
DANI: Yeah, you are. We’re lucky you’re doing it, too. All right, so. Our last show, we talked about the core, capital T capital C. The Core. Anybody who is somebody, they want to know all about the core. And you propose a whole different way of connecting with and using your core in your latest book, Move Your DNA, which didn’t I read is in its second print? What?
KATY: I know, what what?
DANI: Whaaat?
KATY: We sold out of our first print, which is – I can’t even –
DANI: That rules.
KATY: It’s crazy. It’s great. It’s amazing. But even more exciting to me, I mean, I’m glad that there’s a lot of people out there reading and finding value in the book and recommending the book, because keep in mind: we sold out our first print. And technically speaking, the book just came out yesterday. So the book’s actually been shipping for about 10 weeks. It came out a little bit earlier. So it’s been shipping – the pre-sale’s over, the end of summer in September. But with the official release date of yesterday, to have already been sold out of our first print was just crazy. But even more than that was that the foreign translations –
DANI: Foreign translations. So where now? Who wants?
KATY: Well, Korea. The Korean publishing company just bought the rights to all 3 books: Alignment Matters, the foot book and Move Your DNA, which is neat. And the foot book was just – it was already translated into Russian, but it’s just – it’s just out now. It takes like 18 months. It takes such a long time for publishing to actually produce the book, and then we just got the inquiry for rights to the Czech – Czechoslovakian translation. So I just want a copy of them all, right there.
DANI: Oh, yeah, that is amazing. It’s just so neat to think about so many people all over the world reading and learning this stuff.
KATY: I know, it’s crazy.
DANI: Yeah. Mm-mm. good one on ya. That’s cool.
KATY: Thank you! Thank you. That was very Irish of you.
DANI: So when we talk about core, something that always – always – will invariably come up is a discussion or questions about diastasis recti. Recti? How do you say it? Diastasis recti?
KATY: I say diastasis recti
DANI: But some people say diastasis recti – we’re going to call it DR for short, okay? So that’s the new name that we’re stamping. Boom. It’s DR. Diastasis recti. For those of you listening who’ve already been diagnosed with this or have self-diagnosed with DR, you know what it is, but KB, would you mind defining it for those who aren’t familiar with the condition?
KATY: All right. KB on DR.
DANI: Yes.
KATY: Well, and I think that the process of defining it is tricky – is it not tricky?
DANI: Well, I just want everybody to have kind of the same understanding
KATY: Yes. Yes, yes.
DANI: So that we can continue to talk about it.
KATY: With – you’ve got your rectus abdominal muscles which are running down the front of your abdomen, they’re like your 4-pack or your 6-pack muscles. They’re the ones that are on the left and right side of your bellybutton. And some people experience an unnatural distance between the portion of the right and left halves, meaning that one of the halves has pulled away from the midline of the body. Or both of the halves have pulled away from the midline. So that’s the definition – I’m honing in on the unnatural distance, because the right and left half of your abdomen are always separate from each other. They’re not the same muscle; they’re two separate muscles. And so I think – I read a lot of, or people send me a lot of general descriptions of diastasis recti, and it’s just “separation of the rectus abdominal muscles.” Like, they’re already separate. They’re not connected. They’re not the same muscle. So that’s the definition, because they also change distance from each other naturally in some incidences, like pregnancy. But then we have the unnatural distance, where it’s pulling too far away from the midline. So it’s the unnatural distancing of one or both halves of the rectus abdominus from the midline. Final answer.
DANI: Love that definition.
KATY: Or FA. Final Answer.
DANI: Final answer. We’re just going to talk in abbreviations for the rest of our time.
KATY: That’s right. The first person who can translate the entire podcast and get it right can have a free book.
DANI: They get a copy of the Korean Move Your DNA. Signed in Korean by Katy Bowman, or KB. Okay.
KATY: Okay!
DANI: Okay. So we’ve got that. We’ve got our working – yeah – here’s what we’re talking about. DR. An unnatural distance, and I like that.
KATY: Blowing your mind already, right? Thinking about it a little bit.
DANI: It’s – as we know, and I won’t go into huge detail, but I’ve had years ago trained in a popular method of healing DR, and have over the years figured out different things about it. I’m kind of fascinated with it, as a lot of us are. Judging by the Aligned and Well page, pretty much everyone is fascinated with it. We have a lot of questions to answer. So I like thinking of it in that way: that already helps shift the paradigm a little bit. So men and women can have this, right? Babies. Children, toddlers.
KATY: Yep.
DANI: Surgery aside, which is not really a way of fixing it, but it’s a way some people deal with it. Methods of dealing with DR are exercise-specific. We had a lot of questions on the Aligned and Well page and they were awesome questions, and they mean a lot and I’m so grateful that everybody put that out there. Many of them are the same and they’re focused on: what exercises can I do? What – yeah. They’re exercise specific.
KATY: Well, I get so many questions. This is what I’ve found, and I’m going to preface this by saying that I’m writing a small diastasis recti handbook to understand – I’m sorry, did I say diastasis recti? I mean DR.
DANI: DR! DR!
KATY: The DRH, which is by KB, prefaced by DH. That is a way of understanding the part of the discussion of diastasis recti that’s always left off, which is the forces. We’ve talked about parts – it’s like, it’s the separation, it’s the widening, it’s the rip in the linea alba, it’s these muscles, it’s the failure to use your transverse abdominus. We always talk about it like it’s a parts issue instead of talking about the forces. You don’t have something move away from something else unless there’s a force that made it. And so a lot of the correctives that people are looking for are like, what are these five exercises to fix these muscles? Where I’m like, hold on: before you even think about fixing the muscles, you need to understand the forces. Because you’re probably trying to fix the muscles without changing the set of forces that made the condition. So it’s like trying to get something to close when you are actively still pulling it apart. And so that’s –
DANI: And I think that’s why there are so many questions out there that are exercise specific –
KATY: Yeah
DANI: Because people are doing those things to fix the muscles without considering the forces, or that it’s a whole body connection. It’s a whole body thing, and that’s why there are so many questions and so many methods.
KATY: And it’s not just a whole body thing, it’s a whole world thing. It’s you and your environment. It’s not – you are not a closed system. The forces that I’m talking about are created by how you move 100% of the time, and what moves you 100% of the time. Not just the right and left halves of your rectus abdominus. So if I could – if I could, without looking at the list of questions – the questions that I always get are essentially: what exercises do I need to do to fix it? Can I actually fix it is the second one.
DANI: Yeah.
KATY: And what’s the other one? Like, um, okay, I need to look at the list of questions. It’s really just those two things, right?
DANI: Well, actually, and coming in at a distant third, splinting and binding and girdles.
KATY: Oh, right. Right.
DANI: That’s one that shows up a lot.
KATY: Yes, yes. And the other one is, is binding it from the outside helping or hurting. So yes, I forgot. That is actually – I just wrote a section in the book where I listed all the questions, and I knew there were more than two. That was the third one: binding. I get a lot of questions on binding. And then a lot of people interested in DR are pregnant.
DANI: Yeah
KATY: So then there’s this whole other, like, what should I do when I’m pregnant? Should I try to fix it afterwards? It still goes into the category of the first three, but we understand that we’re listening – it’s a broad range of interest, but in the end it’s really a narrow band of information that people are after. So that all said, where should we start? We have a definition, we have an understanding of what people want to know, and then there’s this thing that I’m trying to contribute which is: the problem that you’re experiencing with the distance of your rectus abdominus from your midline is a whole body/whole force issue. So I will just say right up front: I have no set of exercises that you can do 15-90 minutes a day that will close it so that you can go back on to your regular life, okay? But before you hang up –
DANI: But don’t stop listening, folks! Don’t stop listening!
KATY: Yeah. And I say that because that’s just the mentality. We want the 5 – give me the 5 steps, give me the 5 exercises, and.
DANI: And just so you know, if you’re listening, and I hope you are, people – it’s good that she got that out of the way, because that’s going to make you hear what she’s going to say without looking for your prescription of 100 whatevers.
KATY: Right. Right.
DANI: So I want you to – and I’ll tell you later
KATY: Tell them now. Tell them now.
DANI: Okay. You measure your DR with finger-widths is the common way to do it, and we can go into that a whole different time. You can check out a lot of different sites that do it. But I had a huge first baby. I’m 5’4” and I had a 10.5 lb. baby, so I had an 11-finger, unnatural distance between my two recti muscles. And I –
KATY: I’m going to put – I’m going to put my fingers together. So if you’re saying that I –
DANI: I had to have somebody else come in.
KATY: Yes. Right.
DANI: Yeah. So I had to have somebody else come in, and all the other issues – we went with that, but anyway, I tried for years using popular methods of DR, we’ll call it ‘healing,’ and it didn’t really experience much permanent closure and created a whole bunch of other body issues that were related to it. When I started doing whole body alignment and whole body movement and alignment, I went from – I think when I started and I met you I was at 7 fingers, and with a lot of work, a lot of daily exercises. I bagged those, I started doing the things that you teach, and I am down to 2 fingers in the middle. No sit-ups, folks, and completely closed at the bottom, so. So I am the proof, the pudding. If you want to talk to me, you can email me.
KATY: For the – what exercises? Tell me the five exercises!
DANI: And there are no – as I said, it’s not abdominal exercises. So please do listen to what she has to say. And I’m out. Ok. Go.
KATY: Jeez.
DANI: Drop mic, walk away. Yeah.
KATY: Drop the mic. Well, yes. And so I want to say that there’s no exercises, but of course there are – there’s correctives. There’s a way to correct the forces that you create with your body 100% of the time that people like you and many, many other people that I’ve worked with – hundreds, thousands – have brought the sides of their diastasis recti – dangit, their DR – back to the midline. Back to where it once was, or closer than it is now, just depending on the person. So this is a podcast, so it’s difficult to – I guess, like, where do you go from here? It’s difficult to list, again, what those things are. But in general I think that the way that people approach diastasis – their understanding of diastasis recti is that they know that the rib cage, they know that the rib cage has widened away from each other. I get that a lot.
DANI: Yep, that comes up a lot.
KATY: It’s like, it’s flaring, the right and left half of my rib cage have been pushed apart. And I think that a lot of people notice issues after the fact, so – like you were talking about, you had a large baby and a large diastasis recti, and this is the kind of stuff that I say that people – I don’t know if they hate it. It flips everything kind of around. I would wager that you probably had a diastasis recti before you were pregnant.
DANI: Oh, I’m sure I did.
KATY: And I also – because of this new literature of the size of the baby, and the amount that the mother sits, or doesn’t sit – it’s at, I think of the – it’s like the goldfish syndrome – the goldfish gets bigger based on the size of the bowl that you put it in. People will see this, like, I had a really big baby and therefore I have a really big diastasis recti, where I say it could also very likely be the other way around, where the diastasis recti is giving a particular environment to the uterus as far as pressure goes. So if you’re missing a muscular wall of support, there’s these pressures that are missing and we don’t know that much, really, about triggers of growth. We know now that embryonic cells specifically are sensitive to mechano-pressure, to mechanical input. So then you’re like, okay, well, if we go into pregnancy – and so many people think of DR as a pregnancy related issue, but there’s plenty of people who have DR who have never been pregnant. There’s also people – you think of it as also being like, you have a soft stomach. When you see a soft stomach. The association is that a flat stomach is diastasis recti-free, that’s a big association. People will think, my stomach will finally be flat when I don’t have diastasis recti, and that’s – you don’t want to start linking those two things together, because there’s a lot of people who have such flat, tight stomachs and they end up with the diastasis recti. So there’s all this, I think with the postnatal community, their understanding of diastasis recti is their stomach will finally be flat once its gone. And then there’s all these other people who have always had super flat stomachs and they’re like, why is my diastasis recti here? I do so much core work and the mechanical component that’s the same in both cases is the tension. It’s like, there is tension and strength are two different things and that you can have tension and have a flat stomach, and you can have tension and have a very un-flat stomach, and that there’s more going on here that needs to be talked about. So that’s what we’re doing, we’re talking about it. So the rib cage – the positioning of the rib cage – is that you and anyone else with a spread rib cage probably have been having it for some time. The tendency specifically to lift the rib cage, to press the rib cage forward, so that over time you think of, like, okay, my rib cage is going up and maybe forward – that the net result of the way that the muscles attach is you’re also, by the way that you stand habitually – this has nothing to do with how much core exercise you do or don’t do, it has nothing to do with that – the way that you stand can be pulling the right and the left halves of the abdomen away from each other, and that that’s where it starts for a lot of people. And then you take that, and you load it with pregnancy, or you load it with a big backpacking trip, or whatever else you load it with, and then your structural integrity decreases and then you add coping mechanisms like, I’m going to tuck my pelvis for more core strength, and then that makes it worse, and now we’re kind of in these loops of coping mechanisms to fix something that was really in the making a long, long time ago.
DANI: Yeah. Something that we don’t really fully understand at that point when it’s happening.
KATY: Yeah. And it seems to come up, because if you’ve had a pregnancy, if you’re already kind of prone to this widening spread and then you put a baby in there, and you put a big baby in there, or twins, then that obviously increases the load. But your muscles should be able to respond an adapt to load, it’s just that geometrically speaking there are things that you can be doing with your pelvis and your whole body, the way that you carry yourself and the tension in the psoas and the position of your ribs that increase the forces to the linea alba. So the LA – the linea alba – is the structure that, in the most simplistic terms, that is the tissue – we always say that it’s the tissue that your rectus abdominus connects to. That’s not really the case, but I think that just for right now it’s good enough. You’ve got this linea alba, and then to the right and left of it are the halves of the right and left rectus abdominus. And that the linea alba is a tissue that – I don’t know if a lot of people know this or not – this is in the book – it’s a tissue that deforms very well if you pull the top and bottom away from it. If you trace your fingers down to the bottom of that, it’s your xiphoid process, the bottom of your sternum. And so your linea alba is essentially a line that continues down from that and goes down to your pelvic bone. You’ve got this long –
DANI: Okay, from the bottom of your sternum
KATY: Yes
DANI: Down to your – to the pubic bone, did you say?
KATY: Yeah, to like, your – how do I think about it? Like your, to the top of your pelvis. Where your pubic symphisis is and the right and left halves of your pelvis come together. You’ve just got this seam going down, and it stretches – it actually has give pulling the top away from the bottom. So I – I love my Facebook page. I would marry my Facebook page if I could, because there’s so many wonderful people up there who help, like, when I have a problem. And one of the problems I had when I was writing the DRH – that’s the diastasis recti handbook – was coming up with – I like to use metaphors, but I like to teach mechanics using things that people use in their everyday life. So I was like, I need a structure that stretches really well when you pull it one way, but not really well when you pull it the other way, and what everyone collectively came up with was if you were a sewer, if you sew, or if you have pants on, you can go cut them open. When there’s a piece of elastic that they use in waistbands, it gets longer as you pull one end away from it – like a ribbon, ribbon elastic – do you know what I’m talking about?
DANI: Yeah, yeah.
KATY: And I’m not a sewer, just FYI, so that’s why I had problems coming up with this. But if you pull this ribbon elastic length-wise, it stretches or deforms. But if you grab the short ends of it and try to pull those away from each other, there’s no give in that direction. So your – your abdominal contents fluctuate naturally in terms of either baby mass coming and going or fat mass coming and going. That it’s okay to change shape. Your body can handle changing shapes, so that as your abdominal contents fill the length of your diastasis recti – I’m sorry, the length of your linea alba can accommodate that. But it doesn’t accommodate being pulled to the right and to the left very well. So if you imagine a pulling away force that kind of is along the plane of a belt that you’re wearing, so if you think of grabbing the right and left halves of your rectus abdominus and pulling it away from the midline of your body, the linea alba does not withstand that kind of force very well, and deforms very easily when you do that. And in the case of diastasis recti, what you need to be looking for are the things that you do with your body that are creating the right to left pull on the linea alba, because that’s what destroys it. Not the growing longer, but the growing wider. And that has a lot to do with the tension that’s in the waist: how tight are your obliques in their relationship. And most of us – how much twisting have you done in your life, meaning if you were out in the world digging and gathering, you would be doing a lot more rotation. You would be using your waist muscles – you would be, I think of like, um, pulling heavy roots out of the garden, have you ever had to do that? Where they’re deep?
DANI: Mm-hmm.
KATY: And you grab and you’ve got one leg out in front of the other, and you’ve got both hands on this root, and you’re pulling it back. Well, that’s a twisting motion. And in nature, you would actually use that quite a bit, because the things that you eat, take shelter under, need to pull up and out of your way are usually in the ground, right? So you’re doing this motion – it’d be a much more natural motion for you. But we almost always just square our shoulders to our hips, the end. You’ve been positioned like that 99% of your life, and so your obliques do not yield very well, and so you go to do a twisting motion and then you end up with this tension between the obliques and the rectus abdominus that your obliques are just in the resting tension because they are so tense and never ever change in length and don’t have to remain supple; they’re constantly pulling your linea alba away from – oh, sorry. Pulling the rectus abdominus away from the linea alba. See, this is why it’s so much easier to put everything in writing and have it.
DANI: No, it’s good, though. And then – you’re doing fine. You’re explaining it well. So that side to side tension caused by the tension in the obliques that don’t yield; when you talked earlier about the forward holding or the forward pushing of the rib cage? Is that part of that side-to-side tension? Because in my brain I’m going, well, that’s kind of like pulling it from above, and you said it could yield that way.
KATY: Well, it’s not. It’s not really pulling it above. If you’re looking at it as a 2-dimensional thing, yeah, it is. But when you lift your rib cage, you’re simultaneously also creating a widening effect. The physics are a little bit – it’s a little bit more challenging of a model, but it has these elements of right to left displacement, as does – so you think of, okay, I’m talking about my diastasis recti. Do not talk about anything north of the sternum, because you just said that everything was below the sternum, but here’s the thing: your right shoulder is connected to the right half of your rib cage, and your left shoulder is connected to the left half of your rib cage. So when you’ve got resting tension - when you’ve got tight shoulders what does that mean? Your arm bone doesn’t move as freely at the gleno-humeral or shoulder joint, which means that the muscles that go over it, the muscles that attach the arm to the shoulder and also that connect that shoulder to the rib cage. When you have a tight shoulder and you pull it back, you’re pulling the right half of your rib cage away from the other half, and that your upper body is constantly under this kind of pull to the right, pull to the left tension in that when you fix your posture, when you pull your shoulders back, you’re kind of always pulling the right half of your abdomen away from the left half of it because of how tight the shoulders are. So when –
DANI: And that’s huge for I think our male listeners or people who haven’t been pregnant to know how this happens, because a lot of people that I’ve seen are like, ‘well, I didn’t have a baby, how could this happen?’ but this is – it’s all about that tension, and that’s – thank you for bringing that up.
KATY: And it’s also all about how much kyphosis you have. So when we measure your kyphosis at the institute, you line up your legs, you line up your pelvis, and then you drop your rib cage so that the front of your ribs, the bottom of your ribs line up in a vertical plane with the front points of the pelvis. And from there we can see how much curve to the spine that you have. And then people will say, am I supposed to walk around like this? And it’s like, no, but what you should know is how you hide it during the day, or how you cope with it during the day means that you have to displace the rib cage relative to the pelvis, stressing and straining the linea alba and the abdominal muscles. Everything that really connects between the pelvis and the rib cage all the while, so that if you’re trying to fix your diastasis recti and you haven’t even really begun to consider how your shoulder girdle is pulling on it, then you could be doing a lot of abdominal exercises – even if you were diligent with them – for naught. And not really for naught, but to little avail, because the forces placed back on your trunk are – as soon as you’re done doing the exercises – are the same ones that made it in the first place. Does that make sense?
DANI: It does.
KATY: It’s kind of like, you know, can we talk about Move Your DNA and the orca and the pool again?
DANI: Sure.
KATY: So
DANI: Just don’t say flaccid.
KATY: Flaccid Fin Syndrome. Is – flaccid’s like your word. My sister’s word is moist.
DANI: Actually, moist was my word before you said flaccid. Seriously, most just makes my skin crawl, but now flaccid – congratulations.
KATY: But you do realize that orcas – an orca’s fin will be both of those things in the ocean. It would be both moist and flaccid, so. You will never, ever get to work at Sea World, which is good news for you.
DANI: No. That’s okay.
KATY: So your orca’s swimming and swimming in the tank, and we talked about how they tend to swim in a counter-clockwise position. Their fin tends to collapse to the left, or into the direction that they’re swimming, because that’s the way that the forces walk. In the same way that if you got up right now – in fact, we always take a movement break, yes?
DANI: Yes.
KATY: What if you just got up right now, for 20 seconds, and you walked in a counter-clockwise circle so you could experience the forces walking in a circle are different than walking straight ahead. So get up, walk in a circle. It doesn’t have to be a huge one, like if you think relatively speaking of the size of a tank to a whale, you can make an 8 or 10 foot circle in diameter and then just walk it a few times, and you’ll feel the way the forces load your body. You’ll feel heavier on one leg. Get a sense of that. Are you doing it? Are you walking?
DANI: I’m not walking. My cords will get all tangled up.
KATY: Oh.
DANI: But I roller skate regularly, and they only have you go one direction for 3 hours at the rink, and then at the end of the three hours they say, okay everybody, honk honk, it’s time to switch directions! And it’s the worst thing because you don’t under – your body has been placing this load in a certain direction for 2-3 hours and all of a sudden you have to go the other way and your muscles don’t work, and everything will shorten.
KATY: Three hours?
DANI: It’s weird. It’s weird. I don’t know – I’m going to talk to them this year and say, you know, break it up a little bit, because yeah.
KATY: We used to always have all skate
DANI: Some people just sit down because we can’t all skate the other direction.
KATY: All Skate Change Directions used to be my favorite. They always used to say that at the roller rink. “All Skate Change Direction,” but they would change it like every 30 minutes, so you might want to just talk to them.
DANI: I think I’m going to talk to them, because that is crazy, after 3 hours.
KATY: Can I ask you a quick question?
DANI: Please! I ask you questions all the time.
KATY: What – this is a throwback, going out to all of those from the ‘80s – what was your favorite song at the roller rink when you were like 12?
DANI: Okay, I’m the worst person for you to ask this to, because I learned to roller skate last year and I’m 43.
KATY: What!
DANI: Yeah. Yeah.
KATY: What!
DANI: Well, and now my whole family’s hooked. We all have our own skates, and, you know. We boogie down. But yeah, isn’t that lame? I know.
KATY: What about now? What is it now?
DANI: What is it now? Ummm…
KATY: When they play it, what do you get excited about? Can I tell you mine?
DANI: You know what I get excited about? It’s Electric Avenue. Do you remember that song? They play that.
KATY: (singing) We’re gonna rock down to Electric Avenue.
DANI: Yeah, they play that, so that’s like, you know.
KATY: Throwback.
DANI: Yeah, you know. That’s my age group.
KATY: Raspberry Beret by Prince.
DANI: Oh.
KATY: (singing) Raspberry beret.
DANI: Oh, that is perfect for roller-skating.
KATY: It’s so good! It was so good. And, um, yes. But while I love Raspberry Beret, I will turn the radio station on any time Purple Rain comes on. So it’s not that I’m a Prince fan, it’s just (singing) Raspberry Beret. Oh, my god. Long strokes with your legs on the – yeah, grooving.
DANI: You know, you’ve had our listeners walking in a circle now for
KATY: (singing) Ras—All Skate Change Directions, everybody.
DANI: All Skate Change Directions
KATY: (singing) Raspberry beret. Feeling good? Feeling it, people? Okay, yes. So make sure that when the show’s over that you walk for 2 minutes in the other direction, please. That was called an aside, right?
DANI: That was a big aside.
KATY: Okay, so, I’m surprised that I can actually remember what we were talking about before, but the thing is: the fin is being pushed in. So if the fin of the orca was to be fixed therapeutically, so the fin – the orca is now going to physical therapy for its, we’ll just say folded fin. I won’t say the other F-word with the laccid in it.
DANI: Thank you.
KATY: So you go to physical therapy and you get your exercises to strengthen the fin of the other side, and you foam roll the other side out and you straighten it all up and that’s amazing. But then you go back to swimming in the same way that pushes your fin back over. Do you see what we are doing with our corrective exercises? We are – we are “balancing out” the loads to straighten it back up for the 15-90 minutes a day and then we go right back to swimming or walking/standing/moving/sucking your stomach in/talking/holding your pelvis/holding your ribs/wearing your shoes/whatever that folds it right back over again, meaning that you can’t make the structure strong enough to withstand the forces that you place on it all the time – or – if you do, that really you haven’t righted the structure. You haven’t righted structure, so you haven’t balanced out the structure’s forces. What you’ve done is you’ve created a set of forces that are equal to, in magnitude, the forces that were pushing you over, which is also not the correct resting state of your trunk. Meaning that you would have to be creating continuous forces in your fin that would oppose the ones created by swimming, and that’s really what happens when people have a lot a lot of strength. They’ve got so much tension that you will create a failure in other places. So you don’t want to “fix” your diastasis recti by creating so much opposing tension to the counter clockwise forces that are pushing you over, you want to get rid of the counter clockwise forces. You want to only be creating forces that support your structure naturally.
DANI: Well said. That’s excellent.
KATY: (singing) Raspberry beret. Thanks. Do we have to pay royalties every time that song is played?
DANI: Good God, I hope not. It wasn’t really played, it was just you singing it, so that was kind of, you know. It’s okay.
KATY: It’s like Happy Birthday, you can only play the trail in.
DANI: Yeah.
KATY: I think it basically got Prince a thousand sales right there. I think, in fact, they probably owe us.
DANI: You’re probably going to get a thank you card. It’s going to be purple. That’s what’s going to happen. Everything he does is purple. He lives in a purple house; you’re going to get a purple thank you card.
KATY: It’s not even he, it’s a sign, it’s the symbol.
DANI: Well, you’re going to get your symbol, on a card, and he’s going to be like, “thank you. Thank you for increasing sales of this 25 year old song.” Or I don’t know how old. I don’t know how old. Well, I think, you know, listening to this, it’s so important to understand that if you could just get it out – understand that it’s not exercises.
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: It’s not the exercise, and that it’s so much more of a big thing and while it’s not the simplest prescription, I think it’s worth looking into and following that thread. In fact, I know it.
KATY: And so, to amend that there are no exercises, of course there exercises. There are a lot of them. It’s just that exercises don’t look like your expecting them to look: it’s not a short list, it’s not about your trunk. It’s about your whole body, head to toe, and how you move all day long. And so if you want to sign up for that, you can, and then you can have a similar experience. I’m so glad that, you know, you’re hosting the show because this show in particular because you’ve had the experience of trying just the correctives and then trying corrective exercise as you change your load profile, or as you’ve changed a lot of things about the way that you move. And so, think outside the core, even to fix the core.
DANI: Awesome show. I could do this 1,000 times over. And we might have to, just because it’s so – it’s interesting stuff.
KATY: It is.
DANI: It is. It’s big, and once you start to feel the results from connecting with that in that way, it changes a lot. A lot comes together with it.
KATY: Literally. Literally.
DANI: Yeah, it really does. It’s connected to everything and everything’s connected to it.
KATY: Well, also, it’s the same thing as, like, maybe you don’t have DR but your shoulders and your sacrum problems and your foot problems – it’s just, if there’s one thing that I’m trying to teach it’s everything matters to everything else. And I know it’s not popular – just for the sake of time. It’s not an unpopular position; everyone kind of gets it, but the time – the time that I do or do not have in my life is limiting. And I understand the need to organize things so that people can prioritize it. I do get that, and that’s why I’m writing the DRH.
DANI: By KB.
KATY: By KB, because I do know that that’s what you need and so look for it some time next year. If I’m not hanging out at the roller rink too much now.
DANI: Do you have one there?
KATY: No, we don’t. We don’t have anything here.
DANI: Fiddlesticks. Boy, that’s business idea number 8,262.
KATY: No, but I could walk in a circle and put on Prince for 20 minutes.
DANI: And switch directions, and –
KATY: Absolutely! Absolutely.
DANI: Mm-hmm. So your skates don’t go all flaccid on ya and stuff. I appreciate how much time you’ve given to this today – thank you so much.
KATY: I appreciate you. You know how much I appreciate you?
DANI: How much?
KATY: (singing) I think I loooove her!
DANI: Aw, you’re awesome. You could just sing that all day long.
KATY: I could, but I’m not going to.
DANI: What are you going to –
KATY: What am I going to do instead?
DANI: What are you going to do instead that’s constructive?
KATY: What are you talking about? I already told you, I’m going to walk in a circle listening to Prince.
DANI: Okay.
KATY: Have I earned not that?
DANI: Yes. Sorry, that’s how she’s going to move her DNA, folks.
KATY: That’s how I’ve decided to move it.
DANI: Yep. River skate, all skate.
KATY: (singing) I like to move it – move it. I like to move it – move it. There’s another favorite.
DANI: Now, see, that was my favorite disco song when I was a ‘90s clubber. It was that one, so.
KATY: I was not a ‘90s clubber. I was not allowed. But I think I’m maybe a few years younger than you.
DANI: Yeah. I’ve got some grey hairs on ya. All right, well, I hope you have an excellent rest of your day. Thanks for talking about this.
KATY: Yeah, thank you.
DANI: And I’ll talk to you later!
KATY: Ciao, baby!
DANI: Bye bye.
For more information on diastasis recti, read Katy's book: Diastasis Recti: The Whole-Body Solution to Abdominal Weakness and Separation.