The Breath Pilates Actually Teaches (And What Gets Lost When We Skip It)
Many of the women who come to my classes with diastasis recti have been working hard at their cores for years. Crunches. Planks. Leg raises. All the things they were told to do after pregnancy. And yet the separation along the midline hasn't closed — and in some cases, it's gotten worse.
The first thing I teach them isn't an exercise. It's a breath.
Diastasis recti is often presented as something to simply live with, especially if the children are long past infancy. What I've seen over decades of teaching is that the window for improvement is considerably longer than most women have been told — and that how you breathe is central to whether any core work actually helps or continues to make things worse. More on that in a moment.
But to understand why the breath matters for diastasis, you first need to understand what Pilates breath actually is. Because most people practicing Pilates today haven't fully learned it.
What Pilates Breath Actually Is
The breath pattern most associated with Pilates is lateral breathing: instead of pushing the belly out on an inhale, you direct the breath into the sides and back of the ribcage, allowing it to expand three-dimensionally while the deep abdominals stay gently engaged. This is the opposite of breathing in yoga, singing, and every day life.
The structure underneath this is what's sometimes called the core canister — four muscle groups that work together to create spinal stability from the inside out. The diaphragm forms the top. The pelvic floor forms the bottom. The transverse abdominis wraps around the sides and front. The multifidus runs along the back of the spine. When these four coordinate, the spine is supported in a way that no amount of surface crunching can replicate. These are the deepest muscles in the body and the foundation of strength, balance, movement and more.
Lateral breathing keeps you connected to that canister. The common alternative — pushing the belly out on every inhale — tends to disengage the transverse abdominis. You can't fully activate the deep core and push outward at the same time.
Two Approaches: Compression Breathing and What Got Lost
Within Pilates breath, I teach two main distinct modes, and students learn them in sequence.
Compression breathing is utilized during strengthening and stabilizing work. You actively engage the transverse abdominis and both the front and back of the pelvic floor, creating a full canister compression that prepares the spine for load. This is what happens before a challenging abdominal exercise or any movement that requires maximum stability. It isn’t a belly brace, which tends to be superficial and rigid like preparing for a punch. It’s a coordinated contraction of an entire internal system.
I teach the anatomy of this carefully, and students practice within their own capability. Once we're also moving, the muscular engagement is often the first thing to go — that's not a failure, that's the nature of learning a new coordination pattern. My cues bring it back. And the practice of noticing when it's dropped, and re-engaging without judgment, is part of the work itself. “Be kind to yourself” is an important lesson, too.
What’s gotten lost in many modern Pilates classes is something Joseph Pilates emphasized deeply in his original practice: a slow, soft breath. In my classes, I use this at the end, during stretching. The exhale becomes so slow it’s nearly imperceptible — longer than ten seconds, unhurried, a whisper of a breath. This quality of breath is a nervous system intervention as much as a mechanical one, and I’ll come back to why.
I first learned this practice in a workshop called Permission to Breathe with Brooke Siler, a master Pilates teacher with deep lineage in the original Pilates method. It's something I've carried into my teaching ever since.
A Third Option: The Cleansing Breath
There's one more breath pattern worth naming, because it surprises people when they encounter it: the percussive, forced-exhale breath sometimes used during the Hundred.
Joseph Pilates called this a cleansing breath. In some traditions it's called breath of fire. The inhale comes in five short pumps; the exhale goes out in five. It's vigorous, intentional, and creates significant internal heat. It is not the breath most people associate with Pilates, which is part of why it tends to produce wide eyes the first time someone encounters it in class.
Each of these breath modes has a purpose. None of them is incidental.
What the Slow Breath Does to Your Nervous System
Dr. Stephen Porges's polyvagal theory describes how the vagus nerve mediates our physiological state — moving us between safety, mobilization (fight-or-flight), and shutdown depending on what signals the body is receiving. Breath is one of the most direct inputs into that system we have regular access to.
Slow exhalations in particular activate what's called the vagal brake — a mechanism that downregulates the nervous system and produces a measurable shift toward physiological safety. This is visible in heart rate variability and cortisol levels. It's why a long, slow exhale can interrupt an anxious spiral, and why this quality of breathing is appearing in trauma treatment protocols alongside traditional therapy.
The slow Pilates breath — the one that’s almost imperceptible, the one we return to during the closing stretch — does this. In today’s world, most of us are carrying chronic low-grade tension we’ve simply stopped noticing. The quality of that closing breath practice is sometimes the most meaningful five minutes of class.
Back to Diastasis Recti
The reason traditional core exercises often worsen diastasis is intra-abdominal pressure. Crunches, planks, and many standard abdominal exercises push outward — toward the path of least resistance, which in a weakened linea alba is exactly the wrong direction.
There’s another piece most people miss: the role of the external obliques. Most core training focuses on the rectus abdominis — the “six-pack” muscles — and the external obliques. But during pregnancy, both the rectus and the transverse abdominis are stretched. When the external obliques are overactive relative to the weakened deeper muscles, which is common, they actually pull the rectus abdominis apart. The separation gets worse, not better, even with consistent effort.
The approach I use with these students addresses both problems at once. We build the transverse abdominis mind-body connection first — learning to feel and activate that deeper layer rather than defaulting to the external obliques. And we immobilize the external obliques deliberately during the work: arms crossed, hands placed on the opposite ribs, drawing inward. With the external obliques held in place, they can’t compensate. The transverse has to do the work. For many women, this is the first time they’ve actually felt it fire.
The women I've worked with who saw improvement came to me with children already in elementary or middle school. They'd been told their window had closed. What they hadn't been taught was how to breathe in a way that let the deeper core actually function, or the modification for the obliques.
Significant diastasis warrants evaluation by a pelvic floor physical therapist alongside any movement work — I want to be clear about that. What I'm offering here is the breath foundation that makes the rest of the work possible.
Why This Gets Skipped
Teaching breath takes time and attention. It asks students to slow down and feel something subtle before they can see anything changing. It requires an instructor to be comfortable with repetition and with correction that doesn't look like much from the outside.
Pilates can be practiced well quickly, and we see that in many of the archive videos with Joseph Pilates and his students. A dance background and real body awareness make fast, flowing movement entirely compatible with full breath control. The problem isn't speed, it’s body-awareness and control. Most of us simply cannot access coordination, control, breath, somatic awareness WITH speed. The problem is when speed leads to momentum and breath gets reduced to an afterthought, a cue dropped in between the movement instructions. When that happens, something central to what the method actually does goes with it.
Joseph Pilates called his method Contrology — the study of the mind's control over the body. He built it around breath. In my Pilates classes, that's not a historical footnote. It's where we start. Try my classes with the New Student Special at the Yoga Center of Columbia, in-studio and live-online.
