MotherTouch is unique amongst most run-of-the-mill pregnancy massage certifications, offering your skills your pregnant clients will appreciate. Let's look here at what's specific about these courses!
Why Pregnant Clients Choose a MotherTouch™ Massage Practitioner:
- Stretching and Opening: MotherTouch™ emphasizes principles of unity, length and space to help ease gravitational aches and strains of pregnancy. A Certified MotherTouch™ Practitioner may use stretching and muscle resistance techniques to help increase comfort and relieve stressed muscles.
- Relief from rib expansion and uterine pressure against the diaphragm. As the body grows, there is more compression toward the diaphragm, the ribs expand and women may have more difficulty with deep breathing. MotherTouch™ techniques can relax the small muscles between the ribs, expand the side body, and release the diaphragm for easier breathing.
- Attention to regions few address: A Certified MotherTouch™ Practitioner may offer external muscle techniques that help relieve pelvic floor discomfort or pressure, hip pain, or round ligament strain. Gentle belly touch may support an emotional connection for a client after multiple miscarriages or previous traumatic birth experience.
Positioning Options: Women’s bodies make dramatic adaptations during the months of pregnancy. A Certified MotherTouch™ Practitioner makes adaptations for each trimester, choosing positions and bodywork techniques that best support these changes. She or He understands benefits and potential detriments of sidelying and semi-reclining positioning, and the concerns about and options for prone positioning with special cushions.
Positioning Options: Women’s bodies make dramatic adaptations during the months of pregnancy. A Certified MotherTouch™ Practitioner makes adaptations for each trimester, choosing positions and bodywork techniques that best support these changes. She or He understands benefits and potential detriments of sidelying and semi-reclining positioning, and the concerns about and options for prone positioning with special cushions.- Safety-based vs Fear-based: Certified MotherTouch™ Practitioners learn the rationale for massage cautions and contraindications and do not perpetuate myths and rumors about the dangers of pregnancy massage. They learn contraindications of certain acupressure points, and also learn that massage over those very same areas does not pose a risk or danger. Unless a client has a specific risk factor that precludes certain types of bodywork (typically in high risk pregnancies) you’ll receive massage to your whole body, at the pressure you prefer, without concern of causing problems.
- No more wimpy pregnancy massage! Certified MotherTouch™ Practitioners recognize that being pregnant is a natural and healthy condition of the body and that massage can enhance a woman’s comfort. Massage does not need to be superficial or ‘fluffy’ during a healthy pregnancy. A practitioner may offer deep tissue work as requested by the client, while still recognizing symptoms or risk factors that may preclude certain massage techniques.
- Relief from Pelvic, Hip, Low Back pain: Certified MotherTouch™ Practitioners learn integrative pelvic bodywork to support pelvic rebalancing, pelvic floor release, and pelvic mobility, relieving hip and pelvic pain, low back pain, and sciatica.
Birth Support and Labor Preparation: During the Prenatal Bodywork Certification, students learn bodywork techniques to support a mother in birth preparation and can offer sessions for women after 38 weeks gestation to help prepare for birthing.
Birth Support and Labor Preparation: During the Prenatal Bodywork Certification, students learn bodywork techniques to support a mother in birth preparation and can offer sessions for women after 38 weeks gestation to help prepare for birthing.
