C or J breathing

MommyAtty

Something that helped me a lot my first labor was the idea of breathing out the baby instead of merely pushing. I haven't seen it mentioned here, but there were some good YouTube videos explaining the technique. The idea is if you are breathing out in a C or J pattern (from nose or mouth, through lungs, through diaphragm, then concentrating on relaxing the muscles and opening up your birth canal), you encourage all the required muscles to relax and not fight the baby's arrival. The reason this popped into my head was I'm having that oh so lovely 3rd trimester constipation, and I remembered that this breath practice worked to relieve that issue last time around. So I'm back to J breathing again!