Body Position While Breastfeeding

Lots of lactation consultants will teach you about positioning the baby at the breast, including me, but have you also been focusing on your own body while your baby is at the breast? Your body position has an effect on two things: gravity and tension.

When you lean into the baby, you’re causing your body to tense up completely. This increases the amount of muscular stress and can cause your shoulder muscles pain. This motion also means you are bringing your breast to the baby, and we should always be focusing on bringing the baby to the breast.

There is chemical communication between the lactating parent and child and it can be disrupted by tension. Infants are empaths - they absorb what we release. Reducing tension can help ease the work of breastfeeding.

Now onto gravity: we want to use gravity in our favor! If we held a plank over our baby on the floor while feeding, we would be using gravity to feed our baby, right? Now, I do not recommend you feed a baby laying flat on their backs - but I am just using the image for teaching purposes.

Shifting your body backwards into a semi-upright position while breastfeeding can reduce the amount of gravitational pull downwards that your baby is using to force milk ejection. Leaning back can ease the milk ejection and help with a choking, sputtering infant and with oversupply.

Hopefully this post will help you focus on your own body in addition to the position of your infant at the breast.