Split stomach muscles.?

Question

My stomach muscles split when I was pregnant with my first. I had a six pack before getting so big. The doc said "it will go away", I lost all the baby weight within days, but always had a hard time with stomach exercises ( I was in the Army). Well I went on to have a second child and I think it got worse. She is now 5 and no improvement. Are there any medical side effects of this or should I just continue to ignore it. Though it is little cool that I show people I can stick my fingers between gap when doing a sit up!!

Answer 1

Not much medical risk. With the muscles split apart like that, you could potentially get a hernia (your insides pop out through the hole in your abdominal wall). It sounds like the hole is kind of big though. It seems counterintuitive, but hernias are usually only dangerous if they're *small*. Small ones can get stuck easily and strangulate, compromising blood flow to whatever is popping out. Big ones tend to be annoyances more than anything. They can screw up your bowel habits with alternating constipation and diarrhea. If you're not having any symptoms like that, then I wouldn't worry about it too much. No surgeon would bother repairing it anyway unless you were having some sort of problem with it.