How massage can help you recover from birth

Birth is such a natural part of life happening millions of times around the world each day. It’s easy to overlook the impact it can have on your body.

Carrying the weight of a baby inside you, the birth itself and caring for a newborn when you're feeling exhausted yourself can take its toll. Taking the time to heal, reconnect and realign the body can both have you feeling much better in yourself as well as speed up your recovery.

Postnatal massage is a great way of addressing the muscular strains and imbalances and help restore your body to a stronger, more pain free state.

Abdominal massage and scar work can; restore function, reduce pain and improve movement and mobility and can help new mamas in the following ways:

Reconnect with your core

Postnatal massage can help you reconnect with your core and regain confidence in your body through touch and breath work. A good core connection will protect your pelvic floor and back ease aches and pains.

Being connected to your core and activating it properly will strengthen and stabilise the area and enable you to engage the correct muscles, preventing pressure being applied down into your pelvic floor. This will also help you to knit back together any separation (known as diastasis recti) and reduce ‘doming’ of your tummy.

Restore correct alignment and imbalances between muscle groups

Major postural changes occur throughout pregnancy as well as postnatally; hips widening, over extension or shortening through the core and rounding of the shoulders are common.

Living in these positions can mean incorrect muscles are firing, so potentially worsening postural imbalances, your core strength and increasing the chance of pain and injury. Postnatal massage can help restore a functional posture through hands-on work and other advanced massage techniques, lengthening any tight muscles and helping to activate any muscles that aren’t firing correctly.

Restore correct breathing patterns

Growing a baby takes up a lot of our breathing space and postural changes that often occur through pregnancy can damage your breathing patterns. When lifting anything heavy (shopping and your baby count here), breathing correctly is essential in protecting your pelvic floor and in strengthening your core.

Using diaphragmatic breathing and hands on massage, you can restore your ‘360/ north south breath’ (breathing into the full circle of your ribs and right down into your pelvic floor). This is why massaging through both your core and ribs is important in improving your breathing.

C-section scar work

C-section scars can often be tight, pulling when you move in certain ways. Your scar may also be painful when wearing tight clothes due to increased sensitivity. Some also experience numbness, making it difficult to connect with your core. The scar tissue may be causing your tummy to protrude or tension in the scar may be causing an overhang.  It’s also a contributing factor to lower back pain, hip pain, incorrect breathing patterns, constipation and urinary urgency.

Massage can reduce tension, stiffness or numbness in the tissue, helping to reduce these issues. C-section scar massage involves working through the full abdomen, around the scar, along the length of it and through the layers of scar tissue below, using a variety of scar work techniques.

Softening tissue

Tension in your core muscles often happens when they’ve been stretched to grow your baby and the pregnancy/postnatal related postural changes that occur - (hyperextending or shortening the core muscles). This can prevent your tummy muscles from coming back together properly. Your core is also likely to be pretty weak, making you at risk of back issues and any lifting performed inadequately is likely to only exasperate this.

Hands-on work at the core can ease these tensions and help close any tummy separation by drawing the rectus abdominis muscles (your six pack muscles) back together. It can also reduce any hardness, which often gives the appearance that the stomach is bigger than it actually is. Releasing surrounding muscles that are tight also helps bring your posture back to a more neutral, functional position.

Strengthen pelvic floor muscles

A functional pelvic floor and being able to activate it correctly will help prevent urinary urgency, incontinence, vaginal or rectal prolapse, help strengthen and flatten your tummy and make sex feel better too! You may be unconsciously ‘gripping’ your stomach, over activating your pelvic floor.

Being able to relax your pelvic floor is as important as being able to engage it; if it’s constantly engaged, it can’t contract when it needs to. Massage and pelvic floor exercises will help you to relax these muscles and teach you the correct way to engage and relax your core.

This post was created by Hannah West for 360 Mama. Hannah West is a qualified soft tissue therapist, specialising in C-section scar massage and pre and postnatal massage therapy as well as being a mum of two boys, both born by C-section.

Sign up to our complete postnatal recovery course now which includes easy to follow videos teaching you how to massage your abdomen and/or scar yourself and take ownership of your own postnatal recovery.