Belly Breathing for Labor and Coordinated Pushing

About Belly Breathing Exercises for Labor

Learn how to perform belly breathing for labor and then coordinated pushing. This will help you learn how to easily and efficiently push out your baby. Learn more about this technique by downloading our app How to Push Out Your Baby from the App Store.

I want to talk about coordinated pushing now. Where this comes from is there’s been a lot of studies done about how we can best prepare women for childbirth. A lot of the ways that we prepare women is for the contractions and the early mid stages of labor. The work that’s done between 0 to 10 centimeters. However, there’s very little that’s taught about how you actually push the baby out, which at that point that’s when you usually the most tired, the most hungry and in many cases, you’re also in the most amount of pain.
So we like to prepare our clients teaching them physiologically. What muscle do you use, what muscles you want to engage, and what muscles you want to relax to give the baby the quickest easiest most efficient way of leaving your body. We talk through this in two stages. First I’m going to teach you the way to breathe for coordinated breathing and pushing and then second, we’ll talk about the actual pushing part of it.
To begin what you want to do is place your fingers together and put them on your belly button, just like this here. You can take a nice big breath, and as you breathe, you want to think about breathing down to the baby. Your fingers will come apart just like this. And then as you exhale, you want to contract up and in. So you’ll have a big inhale as you come in. And exhale and contract.
This is Maggie here. I’ll show you how it works on someone who’s pregnant. She’s got her fingers right on her belly button. She’ll take a big inhale. Perfect, and exhale and contract. That’s exactly right. Big inhale. She relaxes her abdominals, expands, exhale, contracts the abdominals, hugs the baby up and in. And if you take a look at her shoulders you see that her shoulders aren’t moving at all, she’s doing this. She’s not breathing up and down here. She’s really sending the breath down to the baby. Shoulders are still, her abdominals are moving. Looks exactly right. And go ahead take one more like that here. Big inhale and exhale, that’s perfect.
So the next stage of this is in the pushing stage. So you can use that same amount of breathing but we’re going to talk about what muscles you engage and what muscles you’ve relaxed to help the baby exit the body. A lot of people when they say, okay get ready, push the baby out, they clench all their muscles think push push push their butts tight their legs are tight, and the baby actually is gonna press against the pelvic floor. It’s not very helpful. What you want to do is actually engage the abdominals, engage the legs, but relax the pelvic floor, relax what we call drop the pelvic floor and keep your glutes loose. Some people say push with your gut. Meaning your abdominals not with your butt is the best way to push a baby out.
So again, you’re gonna need the same breathing but what you’re thinking is pull the abdominals up and the difficult to know if you’re doing this, right. This is a lot like patting your head and drawing circles on your stomach to engage your abdominals and not your pelvic floor is difficult. But if you practice it you’ll be able to do it and when you get to that pushing stage of Labor and it ready and push you’ll know exactly what to do. We’re going to practice it here with Maggie again. So again, you’ll start with your fingers on your stomach. You have the exact same and relax and drop her pelvic floor. And again big inhale. and exhale if you take a look at her breathing here, too. She’s breathing in through her nose. And out through her mouth. That can be helpful. Some people say there’s a physiological connection between your mouth being open and your pelvic floor being dropped. So if you exhale drop your jaw, relax your face to drop your pelvic floor. And exhale do you feel like you’re dropping your pelvic floor? Very nice, and she’s definitely engaging her abdominals here. Take two more like that. and exhale and one more perfect. And exhale great. This is a great way to think about Labor and about really getting control over what muscles to use what muscles to relax prepare you there’s not a whole lot that you can control during the late during labor and your baby’s coming out but this part of it you can if you have any more questions about pregnancy and exercise or ways to prepare for having that baby. You can find us at oh baby Fitness calm