Massage Therapy During Pregnancy

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Gretchen Rivas with Relax To The Max Massage Therapy, and today we're going to talk about, massage during pregnancy. When you give massage to a pregnant woman, you want to make sure that you don't have her flat on her back at from 13 to 22 weeks. If she is on her back, you want to put a little bit of a pillow under here to lift that fetus off of that vena cavae, which is the main vein return to the heart. So you want to prop them up on these pillows like this, have her face looking forward, but not all the way back up, she's going to be too far down, she's looking at the ceiling. This is where you can do some massage on the chest and in the neck area, always work through here, because they usually carry a lot of tension and stress through here, you can work the shoulders, and just open all this area up through here for her. Don't do any specific pointed pressure right back here, because that's a sensitive acupuncture point that you don't want to activate during pregnancy. Then you would do both arms, you can do a little bit of stretching on the arm, like this, and some massaging through here, put some oil on there and massage that whole arm, and then you want to come down and work on the legs after you're done with the arms. And from this position if you tilt the leg, you can get all the way under on the thigh, so you can get the hamstrings too from this position, and come up through the thigh like this. And you want to make sure that you don't use any specific pointed pressure on the interior thigh there, because the risk of blood clots. Massage the thigh, massage the calf. If the calf has any red shiny, achy hot spots, you want to be careful because that could be the sign of a blood clot, and you want to send them to their doctor, don't massage them if you have any signs like that. And after you're done with the leg, what you want to do is have them turn over onto their sides and hug their pillows, and that's when you'd do some back massage, and some sacral work in the lower back to give them some relief for any back pain that they may have. And that's how you massage during pregnancy."