Top Ten Benefits of Prenatal Massage
1. Alleviates Back Pain
Back pain is the number one reason pregnant women get a prenatal massage. Over half of all pregnant women have back pain at some point during their pregnancy, and it can start even long before you feel like you’re gaining any weight. The back pain has more to do with the slight shift in your center of balance than with the actual extra weight placed on your back. That extra little mass, about the size of a pomegranate, can shift the balance enough for you to feel it.
Prenatal massage helps alleviate back pain by helping you: realign your center of balance; reset your posture; alleviate fluid buildup in your legs; alleviate stress and anxiety, allowing for the relaxation of lower back muscles; improve circulation in your lower back; and even alleviate the inflammation around the nerves of your lower back.
2. Alleviates Pelvic Pain
Pelvic pain is different from lower back pain. Pelvic pain is caused by 1) the actual uterus pushing down on the pelvis, and 2) the effects of hormones on the pelvis and pelvis ligaments. The hormones relaxin, estrogen, and progesterone cause softening and widening of the pelvic ligament and pubis symphysis, which can throw off your gait and center of balance and can cause pelvic pain. As a result, the muscles surrounding your pelvis can compensate and then get fatigued or strained, thus causing even more pain.
3. Alleviates Headaches
Let’s face it. Pregnancy can give you headaches. But there are a lot of causes of headaches, and some may have nothing to do with the actual pregnancy. Prenatal massage can help with headaches by alleviating stress and tension, helping you relax, and by improving your ability to sleep.
4. Alleviates Sciatic Pain
Sciatic pain is a nerve pain caused from swelling, pinching, or some other effect on the sciatic nerve. This pain can be electrical in nature, but can also be sharp, dull, or throbbing. Sciatic pain can be caused by the weight on the lower back and pelvis from pregnancy and weight gain. If your weight gain is more than the recommended amount during your pregnancy, then controlling your weight may be the best way to control sciatica. However, prenatal massage can also help with sciatic nerve pain by relaxing the tension of surrounding muscles and improving circulation of the surrounding tissues around the sciatic nerve.
5. Reduces Fatigue and Helps Sleep Problems
In addition to being able to get some much needed rest and relaxation, prenatal massage has been shown to improve sleep architecture (the ratio and timing of the different stages of sleep).
6. Reduces Stretch Marks
There are very, very few things that have been proven to prevent or reduce stretch marks. Yet the stretch mark industry is a multi-million dollar industry. Cocoa butter and many other creams have been recommended, but they serve more to cover up stretch marks, since lotions and creams generally don’t get to the deep layer of skin, where stretch marks occur. However, massage has been shown to reduce scarring in general and prenatal massage has been shown to help prevent stretch marks by improving circulation to the skin. Regular prenatal massage, such as on a weekly basis, before stretch marks occur, in combination with careful weight control during pregnancy, can help prevent or reduce stretch marks during pregnancy.
7. Reduce Swelling and Edema in the Legs
Prenatal massage helps reduce swelling in the legs and ankles, called edema, during pregnancy. Many pregnant women notice at least a little swelling in the feet and ankles. A prenatal massage by a certified prenatal massage therapist can help reduce ankle and foot swelling.
8. Reduces Stress
A prenatal massage not only reduces stress and anxiety by forcing you to relax and calm yourself through the sights, sounds, textures, and smells of the massage experience, but the actual physical act of massage has been shown to increase serotonin levels (the neurotransmitter of energy, happiness, and contentment) and decrease epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol levels, the hormones of stress.
Also, the prenatal massage therapist can instruct you on ways of continuing techniques to help reduce stress throughout your pregnancy. By improving the efficiency of your sleep, reducing your aches and pains, and by overall providing a comforting and nurturing environment to fall back on during times of high stress, you will find that your overall anxiety throughout your pregnancy, even when you are not getting a massage, will be much better. Best of all, women who have less anxiety during pregnancy generally will have less anxiety during labor and childbirth, and their babies may develop less anxiety as well!
9. Relaxes and Soothes Baby
Prenatal massage not only can help relax you while you are pregnant, but it can help relax and soothe your baby as well. If your baby is swimming around and kicking constantly, it can sometimes be due to certain stresses and anxiety that you are feeling yourself.
10. Labor Pain
Prenatal massage can help with the pain of labor. This is due the mechanism of distractive pain therapy. By stimulating the nerves on a different part of the body, the body is distracted and does not process the pain impulses from the other part of the body.
