8 Reasons To Consider Prenatal Massage
If you’re expecting a child, your life is busy with painting the nursery, starting a college savings fund, and a multitude of other activities. Since your time is so limited, you need to make the most of each moment.
One way you can embrace this season of your life while replenishing your stores is to experience prenatal massage. Getting a massage is an excellent way to nurture yourself, so you’re better able to nurture yourself and the child you’re expecting. The following eight benefits will give you eight great reasons to consider this form of much-needed self-care.
Relief for Your Aching Back, Feet and Other Body Parts
Bringing a baby into this world is a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, it often comes with a lot of aches, pains, and other discomforts. While it’s not possible to minimize the remarkable changes your body must undergo to create a new human, you can increase your likelihood of a healthy pregnancy and minimize everyday pains with a few interventions.
Prenatal massage is one way you can relieve muscular tension and pain caused by carrying extra weight and blood volume from being pregnant. In fact, a recent study found that aromatherapy back massage provided significant back pain relief. More specifically, prenatal massage helps increase levels of beta endorphins or natural painkillers within your body.
Reduce Your Stress Levels
Pain relief isn’t the only reason to get a massage with a baby on board. Beta endorphins also create pleasurable feelings. When you’re feeling euphoric or even just in a pleasant mood, your help oust stressful thoughts and feelings, leaving you with a brighter outlook and fewer stressful feelings.
Prenatal massage is also a way to carve some self-nurturing time into your day. Taking time for yourself doesn’t have to be difficult and can renew your sense of inner equilibrium so you can balance all of the curveballs pregnancy or new motherhood can bring your way.
Rev Your Circulation
Since massage involves moving around your muscles, tendons, and ligaments, it also boosts your blood flow. When your circulation increases, so do your alertness, memory, and other key brain activities. This also helps you better process negative emotions and different stressful situations.
Increase Tissue Oxygenation
The brain isn’t the only body part to benefit from the increased blood circulation that prenatal massage brings you. Since tissues need vital nutrients, such as oxygen, improving their delivery through massage can help you fully benefit from them.
Oxygen, in particular, has a number of benefits for organs and other body tissues. Without oxygen, you wouldn’t just feel hungry for air. Oxygen is necessary to convert the food you eat into energy for tissue repair and replacement.
Diminish Puffiness
While your ankles can swell if you’ve been on your feet all day, even when you’re not pregnant, pregnancy is a time you can expect this problem to get worse dramatically.
One direct benefit of increasing circulation and oxygen levels in tissues is reducing puffiness. Indirectly, you can reduce puffiness by keeping your lymph nodes healthy. The lymphatic system is responsible for moving the lymph fluid around your body. This critical fluid brings immune system cells to fight infection and removes waste products.
Boost Your Child’s Nutrition Status
While your child is inside of you, they are so much more than a passive passenger. They are actively communicating with you on a cellular level and growing everything they need to have a great start in the world.
Although oxygen and water are the two foundational building blocks of life, many other nutrients play a starring role in helping your child’s brain, and body get ready for an active and full life. When your circulation and oxygenation are enhanced, your child receives an optimal balance of nutrients to help have the best possible experience inside your womb and on their initial trek into the outside world.
Sleep More Soundly
If you’re tossing and turning at night, you’re not alone. Insomnia is a common prenatal complaint that often gets worse as you progress through your pregnancy.
Getting comfortable enough to sleep at night is more challenging when you struggle with aching hips or a strained neck. Massage during pregnancy can provide targeted treatment to painful areas to help you break free of the prison of pain and embrace restful sleep.
Ease Your Labor Pains Naturally
Labor is one area that you either want to talk about all of the time or that you don’t want to talk about at all. If you fall into the group of women who don’t want to talk much about labor before the fact, then you might be intimidated by the pain.
Pushing a child through your cervix and then the birth canal is a monumental act of courage. It is also one of the most painful experiences possible. Fortunately, recent research has revealed that prenatal massage can reduce labor pain intensity by 43%.
Embrace Healthy Beginnings With Prenatal Massage
If you’re expecting a child, we want to wish you congratulations! We truly hope that this exciting and inspiring time helps you begin family life as successfully as possible.
We also hope that you’ll begin cultivating good habits such as nurturing self-care and healthy boundary-setting. We encourage you to schedule a prenatal massage appointment. When you take this advice, we’re confident you’ll begin to feel the benefits right away and that you’ll notice them for your child once they’ve been born.
