Sit-ups can give you a saggy stomach
They’re the most agonising exercise. Now (oh the irony!) experts warn...
LIKE most new mothers, Becky Stevens was desperate to get her flat stomach back. Spurred on by pictures of celebrities, such as Victoria Beckham and Abbey Clancy showing off toned midriffs just weeks after giving birth, she was determined to hit the gym and shrink her ‘mum tum’.
And what better way, she thought, than doing sit-ups? For those who do not know — and there can’t be many — the sit-up is where you lie flat on the floor and raise your upper body to a sitting position, using the abdominal muscles to pull you up.
Becky, mother to twins Lettice and Edith, seven, Ottilie, five, and 14-monthold Tattie, began to exercise as soon as her doctor gave the all-clear after each of her pregnancies. But following Tattie’s birth, despite doing up to 70 sit-ups a time in twice-weekly exercise classes, her tum was actually getting worse.
‘It seemed to stick out and became dome shaped,’ Becky remembers. ‘The more I did, the more pot-bellied I became. I couldn’t work out what I was doing wrong.
‘I was being careful to eat sensibly and wasn’t retaining weight anywhere else. My neck was painful, too. In the end, I developed this strange lump on my abdomen underneath my belly button.
‘One day I pulled up my top to show my mother-in-law my belly button had not gone down after the birth. She wondered if I had a hernia — something that hadn’t even occurred to me.’
Becky, 38, had it checked and found this was correct. Her abdominal muscles, which normally meet in the middle but were pulled apart to stretch over her bump during pregnancy, had failed to reconnect properly.
The condition, which is called diastasis recti and affects around one in three mothers, left Becky with just a thin band of connective tissue between her abdominal muscles to hold in her internal organs.
‘With every sit-up I was doing, I was forcing my organs outwards until a section of my intestine popped out, forming an acorn-sized hernia underneath my belly button.’
SHE adds: ‘ By going back to exercise after my babies were born, I thought I was doing the right thing. Sit-ups are still seen as the obvious move to do. You think of celebs going “crunch, crunch, crunch” and then being seen with flat-as-a-pancake stomachs.
‘I had always been a gym bunny so I began them three months after my first two babies, but I was doing myself more harm than good,’ says Becky, who’s from South London.
In fact, by continually contracting her separated muscles, she was hindering their recovery — most women’s knit back up after six months — and making her pot-belly even more pronounced.
Now a growing body of research is finding that not only do sit-ups not work, but can be dangerous for new mothers determined to get rid of t heir ‘jelly-bellies’.
As well as carrying a risk of umbilical hernias, where part of your bowel pokes through your abdomen near the belly button causing pain and tenderness, and carrying the risk of rupture, sit-ups can also trigger bladder control problems, slipped discs — and even make you look older.
In fact, they are now so discredited that both the U.S. and Canadian armies have recently scrapped them after a study found 56 per cent of soldiers’ fitness injuries involved back problems caused by repeated sit-ups.
So if young men at the peak of their fitness are deemed at risk, it begs the question why women, who have just endured the physical trauma of giving birth, aren’t being warned off them, particularly at post-natal check-ups. Despite having four children over seven years, Becky says the risks were never spelled out.
The fact that her neck became painful after an intensive sit-up session was a sure sign she should have halted the sit-ups at once, as Becky has since learned. ‘The pain was caused because my neck was doing all the work to pull up my body.’
It was only when Becky met Pilates teacher Paola Di Lanzo, who has three children herself, that she was diagnosed.
Becky says: ‘Paola did the finger test. While I lay down with my abdominal wall relaxed, she gently placed her finger on my belly, and pushed in when I lifted my head off the floor.
‘ From this she could feel a separation between my tummy muscles of about two fingers’ width — or 2 cm. After that I switched to more gentle, Pilates exercises instead, which trained me to hold my muscles in from within.’
And it’ s not only new mothers who should steer clear of sit-ups.
Post-menopausal women, with their worries about thickening middle sands lack stomach muscles, also risk back trouble.
Stuart McGill, professor of spine biomechanics at Canada’s University of Waterloo, has found the repetitive, unnatural motion of sit-ups puts far too much strain on the back, squeezing the intervertebral discs, making them bulge and even stick out.
What is worse, despite the pain, there appears to be no gain.
A study by Ohio’s Youngstown State University in the U.S. tested the effect of the exercise on three groups; one that did no sit-ups whatsoever, one that did them three times a week and another six days each week.
Amazingly, no group got stronger abs or slimmed their waists, probably because the role of the core muscles targeted by sit-ups is purely to stabilise the centre of the body, and they play no part in achieving the fashionable ‘ripped’ effect, revered by gym enthusiasts.
Physiotherapist and osteopath Tim Allardyce, of Surrey Physio, says many back injuries are down to the fact that people tend to perform sit-ups sometimes hundreds of times every day in the hope of seeing results.
‘A sit-up is an obvious exercise to do but repeatedly forward bending can put stress on the spine. In my clinic, I have seen people who do 1,000 a day then end up with a slipped disc.’
BEYOND
what sit-ups do to your body, there is also the matter of what they can do to your looks. Dr David Eccleston, of Birmingham’s MediZen Clinic, says that, over time, repeated sit-ups can ruin your appearance, giving you a craggy-looking turkey neck.
He says: ‘The platysma is a broad, thin sheet of muscles stretching from the jaw to the upper chest. As the skin ages and thins, the muscles look like bands.
‘There are usually between two and four on each side of the neck. The more sit-ups you do, where the abdominal muscles are not fully engaged, the more you force these muscles to contract to help lift your head off the floor. Over time, they become more defined and noticeable.’
With women not getting clear advice on exercise, and blithely hitting the gym mat week after week, many l i ke Becky are finding out too late the cost of over- doing sit-ups.
With a 14-month- old baby to care for, the last thing she wants is an operation to repair her hernia, which would leave her unable to pick up her baby daughter for several weeks. So she is left with an unsightly bump behind her belly butt on, which means she avoids tight tops and is self- conscious wearing bathing costumes on the beach.
Becky says: ‘ I see lots of yummy-mummies out there who want to get straight back into shape but who are not getting clear guidance about when it’s safe to start or what it’s safe to do ‘Now, when I see them do sit-ups, as I once did, I wince. I know all too well no mum should attempt this kind of exercise without taking the proper advice.’
FOR more information about diastasis recti, visit whitehartclinic.co.uk. Paola Di Lanzo’s website is paolasbodybarre.com