from Your Pregnancy magazine
Image: Your Baby Magazine

1. Get fit and strong
Giving birth and becoming a mother is the most physically challenging thing you will ever do. Toning for birth, by strengthening the muscles that really count, will increase your capacity for the hard work ahead. You will also be able to easily adopt any position you wish to help your labour along.

2. Empower yourself
Attend childbirth education classes. Nothing empowers you more than knowledge. Classes will help you understand the birth process and how to work with it. This will help you decrease your fears, which will pay dividends during your labour.

3. Surround yourself
Positive thinking and positive people will get you through the deep dark hours of labour and the stressful nights with a new baby. Keep in mind the little locomotive who kept saying "I think I can, I think I can..." and in the end he did. Having people you care about rooting for you, encouraging and praising you, goes a long way in helping you get through the strongest contractions.

4. Use breathing, relaxation and visualisation techniques
They work! The ability to release tension, as well as turn inner positive thoughts into pictures (visualisation) is not only a labour tool, but a life skill. Breathing with awareness will really help you decrease your pain.

5. Move and change position frequently
Change positions constantly during labour and move, move, move. This helps your perception of pain. Stay as upright as possible and work with the force of gravity to bring your baby down, opening up your pelvis.

6. Empty your bladder often
A full bladder can be extremely uncomfortable during pregnancy and even more so during labour. It can hold up the labour process and increase your pain level.

7. Use water
Drink plenty of it, climb into it – water has amazing pain relieving powers. Use water to soothe and settle you before and during labour.

8. Listen to music
Music has the ability to transport you to another place and time. Music distracts you and involves your whole brain when you listen to it.

9. Use Aromatherapy
These oils can change the smell of a harsh labour room to a welcoming, soothing environment that reminds you of a more familiar place. Oils such as lavender and camomile have a wonderfully calming effect on the psyche and the body! Can be massaged onto the body or inhaled from a drop placed on a tissue.

10. Touch and massage
The power of touch should never be underestimated. Although many women love being touched in labour, some don't – then hands off! The way you want to be touched during the different phases of labour will change from soft and sensitive to harder, more pressure-based type of touch. Hard, firm pressure on certain parts of your body will change the way that you perceive your pain.