Go, and if you can get an appointment before the six-week checkup, take it. Most of what a pelvic floor physical therapist does for diastasis recti in the first few visits is breathing and positioning, which is fine to start early. Check with your OB-GYN or midwife before anything that counts as exercise, especially after a cesarean, and see a pelvic floor PT regardless if you're leaking, feel heaviness in the vagina, have pain with sex, or the gap isn't narrowing on its own by eight weeks or so.
Finding one: search "pelvic floor physical therapy" or "pelvic health PT" plus your city. On the phone, ask two things. Do they see postpartum patients every week, and do they do internal pelvic floor exams. If the answer to the second is no, keep looking. Many states let you book without a referral, but your insurance may still want one, and the OB's office will write it if you ask.
What the first visit looks like
You'll be on your back with knees bent. The PT puts two or three fingers across the midline just above your navel, asks you to lift your head about an inch, and feels three things: how wide the gap is in finger-widths, how deep her fingers sink, and whether the tissue under them firms up or stays soft when you exhale and draw in. Then the same just below the navel, and again up near the ribs. Width gets all the attention online. Depth and tension matter more.
She'll watch you breathe. A lot of new mothers breathe into the upper chest and neck, ribs flared, with the belly either held tight all day or let go completely. Either way the linea alba isn't getting load it can use.
She'll watch you get on and off the table, pick up your bag, maybe hold the baby on one hip. She's looking for doming, the ridge that rises along the midline when you brace the wrong way, and for breath-holding.
If you consent, she'll check the pelvic floor internally. The pelvic floor and the deep abdominals fire together, and a floor that is weak or gripping shows up in the belly. It's a one-finger exam, a couple of minutes, and you can decline.
Then she tells you what she found in plain words. She can't diagnose a hernia, but she'll say if something needs the OB's eyes.
Separate from all this: bleeding that soaks a pad an hour, a fever, chest or calf pain, a bulge at the midline that hurts or won't push back in, or thoughts of harming yourself or your baby mean you call your provider or 911. Not the PT.
The exercises, in order
The first week is breathing. Lie on your back, knees bent, one hand on your lower ribs and one on your lower belly. Inhale through the nose and let the ribs widen sideways and into the floor behind you. Exhale slowly through pursed lips and feel the lower belly draw gently toward the spine while the pelvic floor lifts, as if you're stopping gas. That's the contraction. It's small. If the hand on your belly gets pushed out on the exhale, or your jaw clenches, you're doing too much. Ten breaths, three times a day.
Boring. It's also the part most people skip, and then wonder why nothing else works.
Once you can find it lying down, she adds a task to the exhale. Heel slides first: exhale, slide one heel away along the floor, inhale it back. Then bent-knee fallouts, one knee dropping a few inches to the side and back. Then a bridge, hips lifting on the exhale, lowering on the inhale. Eight to ten reps, two rounds. The rule for every one of these is the same: no doming, no breath-holding, and the belly stays flat under your hand. If it domes, make the movement smaller or go back a step.
Then side-lying, then hands and knees, then standing. By the time you're squatting to the floor with the baby in a carrier, exhaling on the way up, you're doing the real rehab, which is lifting things without pushing the midline forward.
What she won't give you in the first few months: crunches, sit-ups, full planks, anything that curls the trunk up against gravity. Not forever. Just not yet. And no all-day waist trainer. An abdominal binder for a week or two after a cesarean, if your OB suggested one, is a different thing.
Between visits
Visits are usually every one to two weeks at the start, then they space out. The work is at home, and it's short. Five minutes every day beats thirty on Sunday.
The daily habits count as much as the reps. Roll onto your side to get out of bed and push up with your arm. Exhale as you lift the car seat. Don't suck your stomach in all day; that's holding, not strength, and it tends to push pressure down onto the pelvic floor. Stand with your ribs stacked over your pelvis instead of hips forward and ribs up, the way you stood at nine months.
Check your own gap once a week, same position, same finger count, and write it down. We built a free tracker for exactly that. The numbers drift day to day with bloating and fatigue, so weekly is enough.
Eat enough. Protein at every meal, and more water than you think you need, especially if you're breastfeeding. Tissue doesn't remodel well on four hours of sleep and coffee, and we know you can't always fix that part.
What usually changes, and in what order: first the breathing gets easier and you can feel the draw-in without thinking about it. Then the doming stops during movement. Then the tissue under your fingers firms up on an exhale. Width narrows last, over weeks, and it may never go back to one finger. That's fine. A two-finger gap with firm tension that doesn't dome is a working core. A one-finger gap that sinks deep and domes on a sneeze isn't.
If after several months of consistent work you still have a wide, soft, deep gap, or a bulge that bothers you, the PT will send you back to the OB for a surgical opinion. That's the route for a few people, and the rehab you did beforehand is still what makes the recovery go well.
If you want the home portion written out as one daily routine, our guide The 10-Minute Mom Pooch Reset is the same progression above, laid out day by day.
The 10-Minute Mom Pooch Reset
The 12-week, 10-minute-a-day core and belly plan for exhausted moms: the gap check, breath-to-core, three phases, kitchen-counter and naptime routines, food that helps, and 6 printable trackers.
See the plan →Not sure yet? Take the free 2-minute quiz
Educational content from the Mom Pooch Reset team. Not medical advice for your specific situation. Get clearance from your OB-GYN or midwife before exercising after birth, and see a pelvic floor physical therapist for leaking, pain or a bulge.
