Hold Your Breath and Push?

The typical medical practice of coaching women to hold their breaths while pushing to the count of 10 is now coming into question, called the Valsalva maneuver, or "purple pushing." A study of 320 birthing women reported in the January, 2006, issue of Journal of the American Obstetrics and Gynecology conducted by researchers at the University of Texas’ Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, found that although coaching birthing women about when and how long to push served to shorten the pushing stage of labor by about 13 minutes, it conveyed no other benefits to mothers or babies over simply allowing women to follow their own pushing urges. The researchers concluded that although coached pushing was associated with a slightly shorter second stage for labor, it conferred “no other advantages.”