Why Is Tummy Time Important?

Tummy time is time your baby spends on their stomach while awake and supervised. It is basically your baby’s very first workout routine!

Keep reading to learn how tummy time can help your baby’s physical, mental, and sensory development.

4 Major Benefits of Tummy Time

Supervised tummy time is good for all babies, and you can start pretty much from the day you bring your little one home from the hospital.

For newborns, you don’t even need the floor. Reclining on a chair and placing your baby face-down on your chest is an amazing, low-stress way to begin.

As your baby grows, they will begin to develop the muscles needed to lift their head and look around. Eventually, you can place your baby on a clean surface and supervise their tummy time as they work their back and neck to engage with their surroundings.

Here are 4 major benefits of doing tummy time. It takes time and patience over many months to see the results!

1. Builds core muscular strength

To look around, a baby on their stomach must lift their heavy head against gravity. This action acts as resistance training that strengthens their neck, upper back, shoulders, and core muscles. This helps them develop the muscles to roll over, sit up, crawl, and eventually walk.

2. Prepares babies for major motor skills

Tummy time directly teaches a baby how to shift their body weight, push up with their arms, and balance. Studies consistently show that babies who practice tummy time regularly tend to meet these physical milestones earlier.

3. Prevents Flat Head Syndrome

Because a baby’s skull is soft and highly moldable, spending too much time lying flat on their back in cribs, car seats, or swings can cause a flat spot to form on the back of their head (known as positional plagiocephaly).

Tummy time balances out all that time spent with their head against a firm surface. It is key to avoiding flat head syndrome in newborns, older babies and toddlers.

4. Stimulates sensory and visual development

When lying on their back, a baby’s view is limited to whatever is directly above them. Flipping over to their tummy provides a completely new perspective of their environment.

Tummy time encourages babies to track moving objects, learn spatial depth, and coordinate eye-hand movements as they try to reach for toys on the floor.

The LAM Child Health App Helps Parents Keep Track of Tummy Time

Watching your baby grow is an experience like no other. It’s so important to know that everything is developing as it should! That’s why the creators of the Little Angel Medical Child Health App developed a state-of the-art set of tracking tools and AI health checks for parents.

You can use the Tummy Time tracker for babies aged 0 to 12 months to privately monitor your baby’s tummy time progress week by week.

To verify their head shape, just take a quick photo and get an instant assessment. If you have questions, just ask LIA, our AI pediatric triage assistant, trained on clinical data and tested by parents and doctors.

Download a free trial today!