24/03/2026
After last week’s post about doming, my messages were full of practitioners asking the same thing — how do I help women who are scared to exercise? How do I reframe this without dismissing what they’ve been through?
It told me two things. This is not a niche clinical problem. And a lot of us weren’t taught how to have this conversation.
If a woman comes to you with diastasis and a history of exercise avoidance, the assessment can wait.
The first question is — what has she been told?
Women are arriving in clinic carrying years of fear built by poor quality information. A 2025 study co-authored by Gráinne Donnelly found that over 60% of Instagram posts on diastasis contained non-evidence-based guidance, with women reporting real nocebo effects — fear, avoidance, and confusion — as a direct result.
That is the clinical reality we are working with.
The reframe that tends to land:
Doming is information, not damage. It tells us how the body is managing load in that moment. It is a starting point — not a stop sign.
When you shift the language from danger to information, you give women permission to start interpreting their body differently. That shift is often more therapeutic than the exercise prescription itself.
Practically, that looks like: asking what they’ve been told and validating that the information landscape is genuinely confusing, introducing load as a dial rather than a binary, and always giving them something to move towards rather than a list of things to avoid.
The evidence is clear that exercise is not the enemy here. Our role is to help women trust their bodies again — and that starts with the language we use in the room
If this is an area you want to develop more confidence in, this is exactly what we work through in the Mae Mentorship Programme. The next cohort closes 30 March.
