A hands-free pumping bra frees up your hands to do many things you love, like eat, apply your make up, read, play with your baby etc. but unfortunately also for things you don’t love as much such as work, pay your bills online, wash the dishes and the list goes on.
Research shows however, that if you put your hands to proper use you can notably increase your milk supply.
Why?
Simply because the more milk you remove from your breast, the more milk is produced. Neither a breastfed baby nor a pump can efficiently empty your breast, although the baby can certainly do a better job than the pump. The Stanford University Website provides a great video that actually shows you how you can use your hands while expressing milk using a double pump. The information in this video if put to practice, can significantly improve your supply and I highly recommend you watch it.
(Note that this material is put together by Jane Morton, MD and produced for educational purposes only)
To summarize
The video proves that the pump alone extracts significantly less milk than if you were to combine pumping with breast massaging and hand expressions.
The results are shown in the above graph. Note that all the mothers participating in the research above pumped the same number of times and the same length of time each day.
The results confirm that:
- Mothers who solely relied on the suction of the pump extracted substantially less milk than those who massaged their breasts while pumping. Their supply also declined slowly as the weeks went by (black line)
- Mothers who used their hands to massage their breasts while expressing had a significant gain in milk supply. This supply continued to grow as they kept pumping and using their hands to massage their breasts (yellow line)
- The red line exhibits the supply of mothers who used the pump while massaging their breasts as will as hand expressing the remaining milk after their pumping sessions ended. They did the hand expressing only for the first three days after their milk came in, thus what differentiates these mothers from those of the yellow line is only these first three days of additional hand expressions. You can see the impact the few days of manual expressions had in their long-term milk supply which proves how important those first days are in building your long-term supply.
Continue reading ‘Increase your milk production with hands on pumping’
Was I confident about my ability to breastfeed? At first yes. I thought that if my friends had done it, I could do it too. My confidence dropped when I encountered the first problems at breastfeeding. I just couldn’t get my baby to latch on properly and as I watched the other women in the hospital lying down with their baby suckling on their breast I quickly became nervous. Why couldn’t I get it right? With nervousness came my lack of confidence. I felt ashamed every time I called in for the nurse to come to aide me and my baby at breastfeeding. I was upset at myself for not getting it right. At that stage I’d already lost all my confidence.
