To Pump More Milk, Use Hands-On Pumping
Nancy Mohrbacher Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 1:10PM Would you like an effective method for pumping more milk? Until 2009, most of us assumed that when a mother used a breast pump, the pump should do all of the milk-removal work. But this changed when Jane Morton and her colleagues published a ground-breaking study in the Journal of Perinatology. The mothers in this study were pumping exclusively for premature
babies in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit.
For premature babies, mother’s milk is like a medicine. Any infant formula these babies receive increases their risk of serious illness, so these mothers were under a lot of pressure to pump enough milk to meet their babies’ needs.
Amazingly, when these mothers used their hands as well as their pump to express milk, they pumped an average of 48 percent more milk than the pump alone could remove. According to another study, this milk also contained twice as much fat as when mothers used only the pump. According to previous research, in most mothers exclusively pumping for premature babies, milk production falters after three to four weeks. But the mothers using this “hands-on” technique continued to increase their milk production throughout their babies’ entire first eight weeks, the entire length of the study.
Hands-on pumping is not just for mothers with babies in special care. Any mother who pumps can benefit from it. How does it work? For a demonstration of this technique, watch the online video “How to Use Your Hands When You Pump” at: http://newborns.stanford.edu/Breastfeeding/MaxProduction.html. As a summary, follow these steps:
1. Massage both breasts.
2. Double pump, compressing your breasts as much as you can while pumping. (Search "hands free pumping" online for devices that fit any brand of pump and allow you to double pump with both hands free.) Continue until milk flow slows to a trickle.
3. Massage your breasts again, concentrating on areas that feel full.
4. Finish by either hand expressing your milk into the pump's nipple tunnel or single pumping, whichever yields the most milk. Either way, during this step, do intensive breast compression on each breast, moving back and forth from breast to breast several times until you've drained both breasts as fully as possible.
This entire routine took the mothers in the study an average of about 25 minutes.
These two online videos demonstrate two different hand-expression techniques that can be used as part of hands-on pumping: http://newborns.stanford.edu/Breastfeeding/HandExpression.html and http://ammehjelpen.no/handmelking?id=907 (scroll down for the English version).
Hands-on pumping can be used by any mother who wants to improve her pumping milk yield or boost her milk production. Drained breasts make milk faster, and hands-on pumping helps drains your breasts more fully with each pumping.
Reader Comments (3)
I have been preaching this technique as a La Leche League Leader for years now. We get tons of questions from working and pumping mothers. This is something I discovered by myself while pumping at work for my twins. I know how much more milk I got when I massaged and was patient enough to wait for the second let down. It was amazing! I have heard Nancy speak on other topics and she is fantastic. I have no doubt that her discussion on this topic will help many mothers.
Excellent article! I discovered most of this on my own while exclusively pumping for my son. He is 7 months old now & I am still EPing 27-31 oz of breast milk per day. I wrote about the compression & the hand expression in my blog post about EP: http://thehongclan.blogspot.com/2012/03/exclusive-pumping.html Since breastpump is not as efficient as a baby at milk removal, I used to get painful plugged ducts several times a week. Ever since I've started to hand express after each pumping session, I haven't experienced plugged ducts again. I wish I would have done it this way from the beginning!
I wish I'd learned this when I was breastfeeding my son! With inverted nipples, I breastfed him using a breastpump. Sad to say I stopped when he was three months old because it took too long to pump (using a manual pump) and produced very little. I remember sometimes I would massage my breasts when they felt full, and then I'd be so happy to see so much more milk coming out! It's only now that I understand why!