Pumping times for Exclusively Pumping mothers

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:

1. 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)
2. 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)
3. 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’

1. Pump at least 7 times a day.
Best would be if you can get somewhere around 9 pumps in the first days. In my case I had started out with 7 pumps and got just a little milk out. I then increased to 10 times for a few days and then cut back to 9 pumps for about two weeks. This seemed to make a big difference in my milk supply.

2. Make sure you have a good pump and all necessary accessories.
Check your horn size. Most women need larger shields so make sure your shield is the right size for you. A good site that provides you with all your pump accessories is pumpingpals.com. They also offer a nipple measuring tool that helps you decide whether or not you need to go for a larger horn. Also make sure that you have a good suction with your pump. Some pumps when utilized so much by exclusive pumping mothers tend to loose the suction they had at the beginning. To get your suction back you need to change the membranes. Buy additional membranes in advance. If you are not sure if your pump is loosing suction just test with the new membranes. You will probably need them anyhow so this is a good investment.
Continue reading ’10 tips to increase your milk supply’

The general recommendation that seems to work for most women is that for the first 12 weeks to pump around 8 to 12 times a day. The length of each session should be around 15 minutes or 5 minutes past your last let-down, whichever is the longest. In order to get your 8-12 sessions in one day, that means that you will pump each 2 or 3 hours in 24 hours. You can have closer pumping times during the day and longer stretches during the night.

These guidelines will help you increase your milk supply. By pumping so often what you end up doing is sending a signal to your body to produce more milk. Every time you empty your breasts, they start producing again.

The first 12 weeks are important as it is believed that during this time your supply is more easily influenced as your Prolactin levels (hormone primarily associated with lactation) are highest.