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Welcome, this is Birth, Baby.

Your hosts are Ciarra Morgan and Samantha Kelly.

Ciarra is a BirthDula, Hypnobirthing Educator, and Pediatric Sleep Consultant.

Samantha is a BirthDula, Childbirth Educator, and Lactation Counselor.

Join us as we guide you through your options for your pregnancy, birth, and postpartum maturing.

Today, we are back with Dr.

Melo for episode three of our Diastasis series.

And today we're gonna be talking about defeating diastasis.

So I'm really excited to hear how we defeat diastasis.

So start us off, Dr.

Melo.

I like superheroes, you know, we are here to defeat diastasis.

It took quite a few iterations of the name when I was trying to figure out the name for the program.

There were all sorts of D words that we paired with diastasis, but defeat diastasis stuck.

Well, that's the one I got trademarked.

And I'm pretty happy with where it's at.

But I wanted to go back a little bit and talk more in depth about how I got into developing this program that I called Defeat Diastasis.

And Defeat Diastasis is our programming that we use at BirthCo in order to help heal core and pelvic floor.

So to go back to COVID times when...

I don't want to.

Just in theory, in our heads.

So COVID happened.

I noticed that people were not necessarily going to their pelvic floor PT postpartum to get treatment because they didn't want to take their baby with them or they couldn't take their baby with them.

And they were trying to limit appointments as much as possible.

They needed everything to be done as quickly and efficiently and safely as possible.

So of course, the first thing that goes out the door as far as appointments go are mom's appointments.

They bring their baby in to help with breastfeeding issues or neck or jaw issues, but they put their own healing stuff on the back burner during COVID because they just didn't want to risk going to more appointments during that time.

So I was working in an office at that time that had other providers in it.

And this particular office had a sports medicine center.

And so I'm over here looking at my patients thinking, I need a way to help them that's efficient, that's here in my office.

And I'm watching in our sports rehab department, they are using this machine.

It's called a NuX Pro to help with sports injuries and like post-operative injuries.

And they're getting phenomenal results with healing up these sports injuries, like twice as fast, three times as fast.

It's like crazy how pairing that technology with their rehab would get them better faster than just if they were doing the exercises or a regular PT session.

So in my head, I'm thinking, well, if they're healing a knee using this machine, I wonder if I could heal someone's core more quickly.

And so I of course do a little Google search.

I'm like, is anyone out there doing this?

And I could not find anything.

I found one research study that did a study on women using a TENS machine.

And a TENS machine gives some motor stimulus to the muscles.

It's a machine that's been around a long time, but outside of this one study, I couldn't find anyone else who had done any sort of technology with healing up the core.

So I started borrowing this machine from the sports medicine department and putting it on the core and seeing what would happen.

And I followed the setup of this one study because it was the only thing I could try out there as far as like how many sessions, how long the sessions go.

And I started seeing really phenomenal results.

And it's so funny because that iteration of the Defeat Diastasis program is so different than what it is today.

And we were still seeing such phenomenal results by pairing this machine with some rehab exercises.

So once I saw that it was working and it was working really well, then I started to really develop the program.

So our program uses this machine called the NuX Pro and this machine has an interactive neuromuscular stimulation wave.

So it basically pairs motor and sensory wave.

So it's gonna help your muscles contract more efficiently while it's sending your brain really good information about what's happening.

So we're rebuilding this brain body connection.

We're getting more of your core to turn on that maybe wasn't turning on before.

And then we're doing this for an hour while putting you through functional core exercises.

So we're trying to attack it from all the different angles.

We're adding breath in, we're adding functional movement, we're adding a machine that helps you to contract more efficiently.

And by doing this, we have created what I call the Defeat Diastasis Pro program.

So this is our in-office program.

And most of the people that we see go through about eight weeks of the program.

Some people will need to extend out further if they've got wider separations.

But in eight weeks, we see a lot of two finger separations close up to about a finger or less.

And again, this is generic.

Everyone's progress is a little bit different, but something that was taking six, nine months before, we're seeing close up in eight weeks.

And it's just been really incredible to see these moms who were very distressed about not even being able to pick up their baby or peeing themselves every time they exercise.

Like those symptoms heal up in such a short amount of time.

And we just haven't had any programs that married all these different aspects together that I know of out there.

So yeah, I'm pretty proud of it.

We put a lot of work into developing it into what it is today.

How many times a week are they coming?

So typically if there's a two finger separation, we see them twice a week.

And if there's three or more, we see them three times a week for eight weeks.

That's really, you know, we do these episodes of these podcasts and we're always excited about them.

But there's always something that I learned during them.

Like I'm even learning things.

Like I'm doing this podcast for other people, but it's so interesting to me because I didn't realize how curated you made this.

Like this machine wasn't even being used for this before you started this?

Not that I-

That's not what it was designed for.

No, it's only been used.

Wow.

So to be fair, this technology is newer to the US.

It's probably only been around five or six-ish years.

There's two companies that make two different versions of this machine that I know of.

So it's fairly new technology.

It's pretty expensive technology at this point because it is pretty new.

So it's mostly just used in a high-end rehab settings, like professional athletes will use these machines to rehab in.

And here you are making this available to moms, which I just think is so cool.

Like, you didn't have to do this.

Like you didn't have, you know, you have to create this program to help moms.

Like, but your passion inspired you to do that.

And I just think that it's so incredible that now we have regular old moms, like in the Austin area, and hopefully even further eventually, that are able to see this result and have access to this machine that they wouldn't have had access to before.

And it was such an investment for you to create it.

And yeah, so the program, you know, it's not super duper cheap, but it also isn't anywhere close to what it really could be because the machine is so stinking expensive.

When you do this, you know, two or three times a week, they're coming in to see you.

Is there homework they're being sent home with or is that kind of it?

Yeah, so typically I will tell people every exercise that you do here with the machine on, you can do at home.

So I just have my patients pick out whatever their favorite exercises are from our sessions and do five to 10 minutes of work on the core every single day.

And sometimes depending on where their level is, I'll kind of guide them as far as like what I think they should be doing.

But most of the time, whatever we're doing in a session, they can take the pieces that they like the most or resonate with the most and they can do them at home.

The most important thing is for them to do it consistently every day, five or 10 minutes.

Interesting.

And so what is like, you've talked a little bit about like the machine, but like, what is it?

What does it look like?

I'm picturing, I used to go to like Better Home and Garden Fest, like fairs with my parents as a teenager.

And I'm picturing those like machines that you stand on and it like rocks your butt, like jiggles back and forth.

I don't know why that's what I'm picturing, but in my head, that's what it is.

That's hilarious.

I do have one of those in my office.

This is not that, although that's a great machine.

I tried to get my son on that like last week.

And he looked at her like she was an absolute pig.

Absolutely not.

My friend, Jess, tried to get on it to show him how fine it was.

He looked at her like she was also trained.

You know, that's not it.

Oh, love technology.

You know, I grew up in a time where technology was just starting to pick up, you know, and we have phones and computers.

And so I love the idea of bringing technology into healthcare if we can heal more quickly and more efficiently.

If it makes sense, like, why not marry the two together?

But as far as the machine goes, if you've ever seen a TENS machine or any other electrode machine, sometimes they're in PT or rehab offices.

It's not too much different than that.

It's kind of like a box.

It's probably 10 inches one way, six inches the other way.

It's got a touchscreen on it and some knobs.

And then it has cords that are coming out the side.

There's two cords and on the end of those two cords, there are pads that we place on you and those pads are where the electricity goes into you.

Those motor and those sensory waves, they go into you and help to assist during the session.

So we call it the leash.

When you're hooked to the machine, you're on a leash.

You can't walk too far away from it.

And that machine pumps those waves into you.

And then we control it by changing frequency and intensity.

So we can turn the machine all the way up to 100, or we can turn it down to zero, or we can change the frequency.

And they lower the frequency.

So we'll start you at 250, and then we might move you to 180.

The lower we go, the more deeper the contraction will feel.

And it's kind of crazy when it's on you.

Some people will feel some like waving of their abs when it's starting to activate.

Some people will just feel more like a cramping sensation.

We really try to find a setting and an intensity that is intense for you, but comfortable enough that you can perform the exercises that we're giving you correctly.

So that's kind of a fine line.

Your body will get used to the sensation as the session goes along.

And so we slowly inch it up as you kind of get used to it while you're moving through these rehab exercises.

So it's pretty similar.

Well, when they hooked me up the first time, it does look kind of like a tens.

So from like a layman's perspective, when you look at it, it kind of does look like a tens unit, you know, like that you would have at a normal chiropractor's office or whatever.

But, and if you do go back to our social media, I'll have to share that one again, just cause it was funny, but we made a reel about it.

If you do go back and you see me be put on it, you know, it was kind of for funsies.

It's not like I was in the program.

So they did dial me up at the very end, just to like show me what it was capable of.

And I was like, okay, that's enough.

That's awesome.

But they wanted to get this resolved.

For me, it was just kind of fun to see what it was capable of.

And it was really incredible.

The, I mean, you could help so many people on such a different range of need because of the range that that machine can go.

It's really versatile.

Yeah.

And some people will keep lower, like at a 30 intensity, their whole time.

It's just like all their body can tolerate.

And other people, we get them all the way up to 100.

So the sessions are really individualized to the patient.

I love my pro program.

It has been so inspiring for me to see people come in that have maybe done years and years of PT and just still are having issues come in and in eight weeks see such a big difference has been, it is literally the thing that keeps me going and trying to push this program out there because it, for some people, is really, really life changing.

That being said, right now, it is only offered in Austin because I only have offices in Austin.

One day, I hope to have more offices elsewhere.

But because of that, I also created a home program.

And this one does not use my PoolnuX machine, but it does model all of the things that we do in our program.

It's just lacking the machine.

So if you're healing yourself at home, it's going to take longer without that assisted help.

But you can still do healing on your own without the machine if you are activating your core in a correct way.

So we also have a Defeat Diastasis home program that takes you through all of the educational portion that we offer in our program.

What does our posture look like?

How should we be moving correctly?

How should we be breathing correctly?

And then it also has daily workouts that you go do and you just follow them so you don't have to think about putting program together in your head.

You just turn on the video, follow it for 10, 15 minutes, and then you're good for the day.

And you do that for eight weeks.

And I'll say that program is so financially reasonable.

I mean, it's, you know, at the time of this coming out, I don't know exactly what the price will be.

But most people can afford this program, at least saving up for a few months.

It's really not that expensive.

And it does take the brain work out of it in terms of what you have to do for the workout.

But it also tells you how to turn on your brain and think because you're saying how to breathe, how to whatever.

How to think while you're doing it.

That was the biggest cool thing that I got from it from the beginning education portion was.

I didn't even, you know, a lot of times you work out and you just go through the motions.

But it's talking about creating that brain to body connection and you heal faster when you're doing that.

So I still feel like, you know, to pat you on the back a little bit.

The home program is still a lot better than what you're going to get just by watching YouTube videos or whatever, because it really does walk you through that mind body connection, which is a huge part.

And the educational part is where I find people are really lacking.

You can find workout videos all over.

And I have people come in here that do some of the exercises that we give all the time.

And then I go and I correct where their pelvis is and where their breath is.

And they're like, oh, my gosh, I've been doing this wrong.

I've been trying to heal this for six months, but I did not know that my pelvis was supposed to be in this position, that my breath was supposed to be activated at this time.

I was just going through the motions.

And it makes me so sad that people have been putting all this effort in without the educational piece.

So for the home program, I really tried to marry the two, which unfortunately means there's some like lecture stuff you have to listen to in the beginning.

I was not prepared.

I was not prepared for how much learning, but I was relieved at how much learning there was.

Yeah, I think it's totally necessary.

Yeah, I agree.

I agree.

I think that that is a really key piece.

Before you go into healing, you have to understand what's happening to your body and where your body should be positioned and how you should be moving your body.

Or you just tend to do things inaccurately.

And it's harder.

It's harder to heal.

I want it to be as quick and easy and as efficient as possible for people.

Yeah, I mean, it's that mind-body connection.

We talk about it all the time with childbirth and pregnancy and everything.

If you don't know why you're doing certain things, then it's going to be a lot harder to do those things properly or do them consistently.

Whereas if you have that education piece and you know all of these reasons why you're doing things, it might feel like a lot.

But it's not going to hurt you to know more.

I always think a little extra knowledge is going to help people find their power, I guess.

I think something interesting that you said at the beginning of this was, you know, you have people that are coming in and they're peeing themselves or whatever.

And a lot of times as a doula, when I hear that, I always tell people, yes, that is common, but it is not normal.

And there's a difference between common and normal.

But I think one of the big eye openers to me when you and I first started talking about this program before we ever even decided to do this podcast series was how connected the pelvic floor and this diastasis recti, if you have that, how interconnected those are and how you could go to pelvic floor therapy forever.

And if you haven't worked on, they should kind of be working also on this abdominal muscle piece, but they don't always.

And so can you talk to us a little bit about the connection between diastasis and pelvic floor issues as well?

Yeah, and when I started to name this program, of course, it's called Defeat Diastasis.

That was heavily our focus in the education and the marketing piece.

But I realize people don't see the connection between the two.

And one of the number one things that we see in the program that resolves is the pain yourself piece.

That's the number one pelvic floor issue that people have along with diastasis, at least as far as I've seen in my office.

And it is something that tends to resolve very quickly when you're healing diastasis.

So I started to try to shift when I'm talking about diastasis to always kind of say diastasis, core dysfunction and pelvic floor dysfunction because they work really in tangent with each other.

If your core is dysfunctional, your pelvic floor is going to be dysfunctional, even if you don't have any symptoms.

And then if your pelvic floor is dysfunctional, your core is going to have a dysfunction.

Even if you don't have separation, your core can still be dysfunctional and be affecting the way that your pelvic floor is working.

So your pelvic floor and your core are very connected.

And if you can picture your transverse core really wraps around from your back all the way to your front.

And that, as you breathe, puts pressure in.

So you'll breathe in, you diaphragm breathe, air comes down to your core, and your transverse core turns on to hold that air in so you don't fall apart or pop open.

Then as your transverse core activates and you have more pressure in your abdomen, your pelvic floor is underneath your abdomen and it builds tone upward.

So you've got this pressurized system and you want these two things to be turned on whenever you are exerting in an exercise.

So if you are going to lift dumbbells above your head, you want your core to be activated and your pelvic floor to be activated, and then you push your arms above your head.

If your core is collapsed and your pelvic floor is not doing anything, then you are not stabilized.

And if you're not stabilized, you're way more likely to injure yourself.

And your body is going to try to stabilize you by turning on other muscles, which are going to cause more muscle imbalances.

There's something called lower cross syndrome that we see actually in a lot of humans.

In the world that we live in, we do a lot of things seated or we're sitting a lot more than we used to.

And so what happens is our hip flexors get really tight and our low back gets really tight, and it tips your pelvis forward.

So if you pair that with your core is also weak and maybe separated, and your glutes and your pelvic floor are weak, that's a traditional lower cross syndrome.

Your pelvis tilts even more.

And so you're not only fighting to strengthen your core and your glutes, and glute strengthening is also a really important part of healing up this pelvic unit.

If your glutes and your core are not firing correctly, then you're going to end up with all sorts of issues in your low back and your hip flexors.

They continue to get tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter.

So you'll end up with low back pain and hip pain.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, and it does make sense.

And you're reminding me of, so for our listeners who aren't in the Austin area, we have a twice a month new and expecting parent group.

And it's either me or Jess, our postpartum doula, or both of us.

And we're in here and parents can come when they're expecting or after they've had their baby up until their baby is one.

And it's just a free group that we have.

And we had a girl come in, a mom come in, girl, sorry.

She was, you know, she came for a long time, like from the inception of the group.

And she was telling us one day that her pelvic, she's been going to the pelvic floor therapist, but she's still having extreme pain when she's having sex.

And that it's causing pain for her, but also just pain for her relationship, because it's not that she doesn't want to, it's just that it's so painful.

We're like, gosh, you've been doing that for so long.

And all of a sudden it was like, ding.

Oh, Dr.

Melo has mentioned before that this is all interconnected.

And I wonder if she has a separation she doesn't know about that potentially the pelvic floor therapist she was seeing wasn't paying attention to that core activation and potential separation and healing that.

I wonder if she was able to get in and do that.

If maybe she would see some improvement in the pain with sex portion of it.

So have you had people come in talking about pain with sex?

I know you said the peeing kind of issue resolves fairly quickly.

Is pain with sex something that can be resolved with this?

Yeah, we have had people have resolution.

And typically pain with sex is actually a sign of a tighter pelvic floor versus one that's really weak.

And something that I think we sometimes get wrong in our world when we're talking about pelvic floor is we kind of throw people into categories with most people being in that pelvic floor weakness category and a few people being in the pelvic floor fitness category.

But I really like to look at it from a more holistic perspective in that you just don't have coordination of your pelvic floor.

Because in reality, you need your pelvic floor to tighten sometimes and you need it to relax sometimes.

And if it's relaxed too much, then you have issues.

And if it's tight too much, then you also have issues there.

So by pairing the breath work and the functional movement, and if you're in office, the NuX machine, we're able to help with coordination of the pelvic floor.

And tight pelvic floors can be harder to regulate sometimes than the weaker pelvic floors.

When you're weak, in general, your baseline is a little bit easier to work with because we can move you in certain positions and you don't have crazy muscle imbalances or compensations.

If you're too tight, if you have really tight hips, a really tight pelvic floor, especially if you're working out all the time, it's almost like we have to reteach your brain how to move at that point because it's so used to recruiting other muscles.

It's so used to tightening your pelvic floor and your hip flexors that we have to really, really consciously work on that relaxation piece while you're doing an exercise, which can be more challenging.

I think that that's what makes it really difficult for people to know what to do without ever seeing someone that can evaluate them.

Because there are plenty of really cool Instagram, you know, I'm so old.

What is it called?

Like real, not a group.

No, but like the page account.

So old.

So many Instagram accounts that you can follow that have really cool information and really cool exercises to do and really amazing.

But if you don't know if you're tight or weak, that's really difficult.

And I talk about this in childbirth classes too.

You know, so many people are focused on being tight down there.

Like that's so good to be tight down there.

And usually that can, like you're saying, be just as bad as being weak if you're not able to relax it.

And we had a mom go into a therapist and come tell us, okay, so I'm tight on one side and weak on the other.

Yeah.

And that is why you need that coaching from that provider to be able to kind of help you through figuring it out, because it seems like there's not just a one size fits all.

Oh, if you do these exercises, you're fine, because different things need to be done for those different issues.

Right.

Yeah.

And I'll say this sometimes, and we don't do this in my office, but a pelvic floor PT will typically do this.

Sometimes they need to go inside.

Yeah.

And sometimes they need to do work internally in order to get you kind of to that next step, especially if there's a lot of scar tissue, if you've got a lot of kind of damage to your pelvic floor, you know, that internal work is difficult to do on your own or even know how to do without someone, you know, that is very well educated and does it all the time to go up there and like release the tension in that way or activate certain parts of your pelvic floor.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I'm thinking as we're as we're talking about this, about all of the like older women in my life who I hear showing a lot of the symptoms that you're talking about.

And I'm wondering how like how would this be beneficial or would this still be beneficial for like postmenopausal and perimenopausal women and people altogether?

Yeah, did you know that the number one reason why people get put into retirement homes is because of urinary incontinence?

Yeah, totally.

Women have more common than men because I'm going to infer from their childbearing years that it was never healed up.

And so, you know, as you get older, you lose muscle tone.

And if your pelvic floor was already not that toned after you gave birth and you never healed it, and you just peed yourself now and then, you know, 20, 30 years later, you're just peeing yourself all the time.

You can't hold your urine anymore.

So, yeah, you could at any stage of life, if you have core and pelvic floor dysfunction, you can work on healing it.

We've worked with several women that were 20, 30 years past having babies, and they just were having other symptoms that never went away for years and years and years.

And they were able to resolve those at a later point.

So you never have to deal.

I shouldn't say never, but you shouldn't have to deal with core and pelvic floor issues.

And it's unfortunate in lots of other countries, like going to see your pelvic floor PT post birth is just standard of care.

And here in the US, it's not.

Here we give you the baby and say, good luck.

And there's not a whole lot of direction or resources in order to help heal the core and the pelvic floor.

But I really believe that every woman should be able to go and get assessed and told what's happening with their core and pelvic floor post childbirth.

I have two follow up questions from that.

One is, is it harder, you know, if you're 10 years, 20 years postpartum to fix it?

And, you know, rather than if you had gone two years later or something, is there a time when it's like, okay, before this, great.

After this, really hard, but you can still do it.

And then the other, I'll let you answer that one first.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm going to say, like, it really depends on a case by case basis.

Of course, the longer you go without healing, the more imbalances you're developing.

So, again, that can be really hard to unwind.

If your brain has been telling your muscles to fire a certain way for 20 years, it's going to take a while to retrain your brain to tell your other muscles to fire more and to tell some muscles that they need to link them.

That being said, it really just depends on your symptoms, how severe it is, your lifestyle, and there's a lot of different factors.

We've had one woman in particular that I can think of that was about 20 years post childbirth.

She had very mild diastasis, very mild pelvic floor weakness, and she was good to go in eight weeks.

It closed up.

She was fine.

All the symptoms had resolved.

So in her case, it was a pretty easy fix.

Now, is there anything that she needs to continue doing after about eight weeks to make sure it stays that way?

Or is it kind of like, oh, good, you're fixed moving on?

Yeah, I get this question a lot.

Typically, once things are closed up and your body learns how to move functionally correctly, it shouldn't re-separate again unless the core is under more pressure than it can hold.

So a pregnancy could re-separate or really heavy bodybuilding or lifting could re-separate it if you're not bracing your core correctly.

But that's going to be in more rare cases because as you've healed, you've learned to move your body in a different way.

You've fixed some muscle imbalances.

So you should be able to adapt to pressures a little bit better than before you were healed.

So I tell a lot of people that once it's closed, you're pretty good to go about your normal everyday life without having to think about how is my pelvis positioned and how is my breathing.

All of that stuff should really be learned and you should be doing it subconsciously once you've healed up all the way.

That being said, your full healing journey, you may in eight weeks have almost resolved everything, but you might not be 100% back to where you were at the end of eight weeks or 16 weeks, whatever your programming is.

So you might continue, you know, months after that until you've hit where you feel like your body is 100% back to what it was before the dysfunction happened.

Then the second part of my question was or other question you said, you know, they came in with some symptoms.

Can you tell us like some symptoms that may not people may not go, oh, that's actually because of diastasis.

They might think that they have a pelvic floor issue, but that you're saying this is all interconnected.

Can you give us like a couple of tick items where it's like, oh, if I'm experiencing this, this actually could be related.

I had no clue.

Yeah.

My favorite one is hemorrhoids.

We had a woman have really bad hemorrhoids.

She was probably four or five months post childbirth and halfway through seeing us, those resolved.

So, you know, I'm not saying that every time your pelvic floor heals up, that your hemorrhoids are going to go away, but she was able to heal those up as she healed her pelvic power.

So I thought that that was a really cool one.

And she was like, I'll never forget the day.

She was so excited.

She walked in.

She goes, guess what, guys?

My hemorrhoids are gone.

Things you've talked about once you've had kids.

And we all celebrated.

We were so excited for her, but it's a fun one.

Leaking is a super common one.

Even if it's just leaking when you jump, that is not normal.

It's very common.

Lots of women deal with it.

It should not be happening if your public floor is regulating the way that it should.

Pain is another one.

Pain with sex, pain with any sort of insertion, even if you're just putting a tampon in, any sort of instability.

So like if you take a step and you feel like your pelvis feels unstable or you get some clicking in your hip, those are signs that your pelvic floor is probably not doing what it's supposed to be doing.

Heaviness is another one that I find a lot of women deal with and they just think that it's just normal.

And sometimes heaviness means that you have an actual prolapse and sometimes it just means that your pelvic floor is struggling.

So it's not able to hold everything up the way that it's supposed to.

And I will ask people to compare what they feel in their pelvic floor to before they had kids, that feeling of fullness.

And if it's more full, if it's more heavy, then your pelvic floor is struggling somewhere.

Mind blown.

Crazy.

That's awesome.

The hemorrhoids thing is still unstuck on that.

That's wild.

I mean, we are with people in labor all the time, right?

That's our main job.

And so we see a lot of hemorrhoids and we have a lot of people that are like not even wanting to push because they are dealing with hemorrhoids.

So knowing that that can have some help by doing this is really cool.

I also want to touch a little bit on the approach that we use to rehab.

If that's okay with you guys.

You know, physical therapy rehab, there's all sorts of different approaches to how you address those.

You can go a very traditional like core exercise route, or you can go, you know, a more functional route or Pilates route.

We use a technique called DNS.

And DNS is actually a physical therapy technique that is from the Czech Republic.

And it's funny because my very best friend is from the Czech Republic.

So I ask her all the time when I'm trying to compare our health care versus other countries health care.

And I'm a chiropractor and chiropractic started in the US.

So we have a lot of chiropractic here and it's becoming more common that kids and babies will see the chiropractor here.

But in the Czech Republic, chiropractic is very rare.

People don't like go to the chiropractor.

They go to the physical therapist and the physical therapist there, they use DNS.

And DNS is a physical therapy approach that uses your milestones that are preprogrammed as babies and it reverts you back to those and you recreate functional movements to relearn those patterns.

Because over time, due to trauma or pregnancy, birth, sometimes we revert to bad postures and bad movements.

And so the most perfect movements that we know are those ones that are automatically programmed as babies.

And fun fact, we're going to talk about this in a later episode.

Babies are often born with diastasis and they close their diastasis by doing moves like rolling and like oblique sitting and sitting and crawling.

And so what we do in our Defeat Diastasis programs is we mimic those movements in rehab.

So there's a movement called a bird dog.

It's a pretty common poor movement.

We will use that movement, mimicking crawling to help activate the stabilizer core.

We also most of the moves look very functional.

So instead of just targeting one muscle, like a bicep curl would be targeting your bicep, we do combo moves that will throw your balance and activate different muscle groups.

So we might have you put a weight above your head in one arm and then have you march.

So you pick up one leg and you have to balance and then you set that down and then you pick up the other leg and you have to balance.

So that's going to kick your core on.

It's going to force your tailbone to stay in a neutral position as you lift a leg.

And it's a very functional approach to healing your core and learning how to move in a better, more functional way.

I can't wait to learn about the kids stuff.

Like this is what you're talking about.

All of that is so interesting to me.

And I know that a lot of people that listen to our podcast have either are about to have a baby or already have babies.

So I'm just like every episode, I'm like, I'm so excited for the next one.

Well, I think it's fascinating because, you know, if you have it as a baby, there are situations where it doesn't close up as a baby.

And then let's say you reach adulthood and then you get pregnant, but you have the separation from when you were a kid, you're more likely to have more separation and dysfunction as a pregnant person.

So it's pretty crazy the way that we develop and the way that everything is kind of connected in our bodies from a very young age.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

That's really interesting.

The human body is just an absolute miracle.

It is.

And the way that we live our lives now is just not ideal for our bodies.

I mean, all of the technology we have is really cool.

It makes life a lot easier, but we sit down a lot.

And even with pregnancy, we talk to people about, yeah, I have such a hard time because with hypnobirthing, we talk about how it's all natural and normal.

And your body knows what it's doing.

But also, do all of these exercises and see a chiropractor and see a blah, blah.

But you just said that my body knows what it's doing.

Well, it does.

But we screw our bodies over by not using them in the way that they're supposed to be used anymore.

You're not going down to the river and getting a bunch of water and putting it on your head and walking, or you're not cleaning your floors on the ground with your hands and knees and getting into these positions that automatically make your baby be able to get into a good position.

Because we're sitting at desks and it's not having to do as much.

Yeah, and a big part of the functional movements that we use in DNS is actually mobility.

And we haven't touched on this yet, but it's really hard to heal your muscle dysfunctions if you don't have mobility, which means you can't move through motions very well.

And hip mobility is one of the most important things that we work on in order to heal core and pelvic floor.

And then thoracic or mid mobility also plays a huge role in healing.

And the thoracic piece is easy because if your thoracics and your ribs are not moving well, you're not able to breathe correctly.

And if you can't breathe correctly, it's like the whole system breaks down from the top.

You can't push enough air into your abdomen in order to get your core to turn on enough in order to get your pelvic floor to turn on enough.

So you have to have good mobility in those two areas in order to really complete that healing process.

It's so interesting.

All right.

Well, is there anything else you want to tell us before next time?

Because next time we are going to actually have somebody on with us that has been through this with Dr.

Melo to heal.

So do you have anything else for us this week?

No, I don't think so.

But on that patient note, she did come into our office and we did a lot of work with her.

But she also saw a lot of professionals and did a lot of different programs before we saw her.

So she's got a really fantastic perspective on what's out there and kind of what worked for her and what the options are.

And I'm so excited to have her on.

Yeah, and what made this different?

Why is this one finally working for her?

So we're really excited to have her on next week.

And be sure to like, follow, subscribe, like Samantha said, all those podcast lingo things.

And we will talk to you next week.

Thank you for joining us on Birth, Baby!

Thanks again to Longing for Orpheus for our music.

You can look him up on Spotify.

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See you next week.