Learning to Manually Express or Hand Pump Breast Milk

With all of the handy and functional battery-operated and automatic breast pumps available to breast feeding mothers, manually expressing, hand expressing, or hand pumping has fallen out of favor. It is still the cheapest and most flexible way for mothers to express breast milk and may be worth learning worth learning just to expand the expressing repertoire. Some mothers actually find they can get more milk and do a more thorough job of expressing milk when they do the job manually.

To begin, many women find it helpful to gently massage their breasts while looking at a picture of their baby or thinking about their infant. This helps with the "let down." Have a towel or cloth diaper and a container to catch the milk handy ( a cup, glass, or bowl work well.) As you feel the milk let down, put your hands on your breasts with the thumb above the nipple and the index and other fingers on the underside of the nipple.

While gently pushing in or compressing on the full breast, bring the thumb and index finger downward and out along the aureola to the nipple. As you do this, you will get a spray or stream of milk. You'll want to catch the milk in the container. As you manually express, you'll want to move your hand, fingers and thumb around the breast and nipple area to make sure you clear out all the sinuses in the nipple area of the breast.

Learning hand expressing technique takes practice. Some women practice expressing into a towel or cloth diaper to get the hang of the expressing or pumping motions prior to trying to collect the milk into a cup or container. Once the pumping is mastered, then the mother can learn to aim into a container. A large plastic funnel (there are ones made specifically for hand expressing and collecting breast milk) can be another way of collecting the milk. The mother can express into the clean and sterilized funnel and can collect milk directly into a bottle.