Learn belly massage techniques to help your baby get relief from gas or constipation. Join Tanya Meyers, Infant & Registered Massage Therapist.
Hi Mamas! I’m gonna do a really quick demonstration of some infant massage to help with constipation, gas, and easing baby’s tummy to go along with the post that has the instructions.
I’m just gonna show, as quickly as I can, a video to help demonstrate. Forgive us, I don’t have a lot of dolls around my kids are older so we’re gonna have these makeshift babies. Your babies don’t look like this. We’ve got our owl here if you want to come over. [My 11 year old daughter Charlotte is filming, thanks Charlotte] This is a little diagram and I had to use an owl so we had but the abdomen is about the right size. I’m just gonna show this is basically the area that we’re working with.
The baby’s ribcage, you can just touch and feel easily. It’s very easy to feel the borders of that bone and then the tummy becomes soft. That’s the area that we’re working in. About two finger widths away on either side in this upside-down U shape is what we want to work on. The area of the colon is the way that, the waste travels through the gut. We’ve got that coming, waste feeds into the colon from the small intestines where it’s processed. It goes up the right side of our abdomen, across underneath our ribcage here, and then down, that’s where it’s eliminated.
We want to work with that direction of moving waste, gas through. We don’t want to start here though, oh sorry, we don’t want to just start by pushing here because it can cause some pressure if there’s some gas or stool stuck there. So we want to release or sort of help to empty this out tube first. I hope that makes sense. Which is why we do it in the order we do it. I’m gonna head over and show you on the baby. Again, this is a very tiny baby because it’s all we had but it’ll show, it’ll do the trick. On your babies, you’ll just feel where the ribcage ends and [you know] slip under that into the soft area where baby’s belly button is you’ll be about two finger widths away. Again your baby’s belly will be bigger than this but it’ll show, so that’s where we’re gonna be.
I’m gonna start on the left side so the descending colon on baby and this is where we’re gonna use the I-love-U technique. I’m gonna draw an I, then an upside-down L, then an upside-down U. I’m gonna do it about 7 to 10 times, whatever works here, depending on baby’s cues. I’m gonna add before I had started that, sorry, I wanted to warm the belly up first by, you know, 10 to 15 of these circular strokes clockwise. Because that’s the direction in which things are flowing. To warm the belly I’m gonna be using [you’d be using] a nice gliding oil like olive oil something hypoallergenic. Then you’re going to go in and do once it’s warm then we’re going to go and do the I, and then the L. You can see even just with the doll, that I’m not just up on the skin I want you, depending on what baby’s tolerating, get a little bit into that tissue. Put some pressure down through that adipose tissue in the belly, down into the colon. We’re not going to touch it obviously but we’re gonna help to stimulate it. We’re gonna do I love U and then we’ll do 7 to 10 of each. Okay but I’m only gonna do a few for the video. Then we would go back to some more general clockwise, soft part of your hand, the soft part of your palm gliding that oil, and we’re done the belly massage
Thanks for watching
