Hand Expression Technique

Now, let’s get down to business, mommies!

Step 1.

Choose a location which is rather secluded and private or somewhere you are less likely to be distracted.

Clean hands are required and make handy a small towel for cleaning up messes.

Have 2 wide-necked baby bottles ready.  I normally have 3, as I was always optimistic that I would get more milk than I anticipated.  Some people recommend bowls.   I prefer bottles as once I was done, I could just screw the caps on and store.  With bowls, there’s the tipping milk into bottles and the washing up afterwards.  Well, suffice to say, I’m a lousy tipper.  *wink*

If you have your baby’s picture or a piece of his clothing, look at it and smell it. That’s enough for your hormones to kick in and start working.  Sometimes, during meetings, if I as much as think of my baby, I would start to leak.  Yikes!

Step 2.

Choose your writing hand.  Then put your thumb (above the nipple) around 1″ to 1.5″ from the nipple.  Roughly, this is round about the areola adges.  Then place your first 2 fingers under the nipple at the same distance your thumb is from the nipple.

Both the thumb and 2 fingers should be making a “C” shape.

Your other hand should be holding the bottle at the end of the nipple.  Make sure the nipple doesn’t touch the bottle, especially when the bottle is near full, make extra sure, the nipple is not touching the milk too.

Ideally you can lean forward and express into a bowl, but I figure the splash it would make would make me lose precious breastmilk, so I prefer this method.

Make sure too that you touch the breast using the pads of your fingers and point the nails away from it.

As a start, make sure that the thumb is at 12 o’clock and the 2 fingers are at 6 o’clock direction.  What we want to achieve is to rotate your hand from 12 and 6 o’clock to 1 and 7 o,clock and so on until you’re covered the whole of the milk reservoirs.

Step 3.

Gently, push the hand inwards, towards your chest.

Then gently still, slide your thumb and fingers forward at the same time.  This action ensures that the milk is compressed at the reservoirs and then ejected from the nipple, in its entirety.

Step 4.

Repeating Step 2 again, but this time, position the thumb at 1 o’clock and at the same time, shift the 2 fingers to 7 o’clock.

And repeat Step 3.  In a regular beat and tempo.  Relax and enjoy.

Ideally, you would want to cover all the hours of the clock.   This is the beauty of hand-expression technique.  You are maximising your milk production by understanding where the milk lies and you are ensuring that all the milk is expressed.  This is important to build up supply and to sustain supply.  It’s all about demand and supply, where breastfeeding is concerned.

Now that you know how easy it is to hand express, here’s more on what to do and what’s not to do.

So, while you’re rotating your hand, compressing inwards and rolling your hand outwards, it’s important to remember that :

• Do not squeeze your breast. The milk flows by the simply physics of gravity and the action of moving the milk from its reservoir to an outlet i.e. the nipple.  The breast is not a sponge, so squeezing will only hurt you.  I think that’s the first mistake people tend to make and that puts them off hand-expressing altogether.
• Slide your hand gently.  Gentleness does pay.  Any rough or harsh sliding will only cause you skin burns and redness and that can never be pleasant.
• Don’t tug on the nipple. Remember, we’re using gravity and a simple action of moving milk from its reservoir to the nipple, so no need to be touching the nipple at all.  In a more serious note, tugging and pulling could case serious tissue damage.
• Lean forward and shake the breast slightly. Remember we’re making gravity works for us, this time.