11/09/2025
Why postnatal rehab is just like learning to drive 🚘
Hey . Remember that first driving lesson where you thought, ‘there is NO way I’ll ever do all this at once’? Yep. Postnatal rehab is basically that.
My lessons were with my sister Clemmie - a so-called “cost-saving measure” from my parents. In reality, it meant more laughing and piss-taking than actual driving. My poor instructor Ron didn’t stand a chance. 😂
Ron nagged me with the same thing over and over:
👉 Check your mirrors.
👉 Check your mirrors again.
👉 Did you check your bloody mirrors?!
At first it feels ridiculous - of course you know you’ve got to do it - but the repetition is there for a reason. Until it becomes subconscious, it has to be conscious.
That’s exactly how postnatal core + pelvic floor rehab works.
After nine months of a juicy baby bum up in your ribs and a heavy baby head pressing down on your pelvic floor, the beautiful synergy between your diaphragm, pelvic floor and abdominal wall gets disrupted. Those muscles lose their tensegrity, their firmness, their timing.
Sometimes they’ll quietly reconnect themselves.
But often, there’s a period of “mirror-checking” where you’ve got to cue:
👉 Exhale
👉 Pelvic floor
👉 Abdominals
Over and over, until the body remembers how to do it on autopilot again.
That’s not over-coaching - that’s re-patterning. And it’s the foundation of every safe, effective diastasis programme. Because if that pressure system isn’t back online, you’ll see doming, bulging, and strain through the linea alba, especially in your diastasis clients.
It’s the boring “mirror checks” that lead to smooth, subconscious driving later on.
✨ This is exactly the kind of strategy we’ll be digging into inside my Bridging the Diastasis Gap workshop in October. You’ll walk away knowing how to give your postnatal clients the right mirror checks at the right time.
👉 If you want to be the first to know with all the details, click below to join the waitlist for the workshop.
In the meantime, keep checking those mirrors!
Alice x
Join the waitlist for Bridging the Diastasis Gap, a live workshop for Pilates instructors on confidently assessing & supporting postnatal clients with DRA.