Getting pregnant is rarely as simple as deciding that the time is right to start a family. Some people are lucky enough to conceive almost immediately, others have a long wait for a positive result on their pregnancy test, and the next phase of their journey toward starting a family. Even if you have nothing adversely affecting your fertility, simple bad luck can see you failing to conceive – fertility is nothing more than the odds of your getting pregnant, and even if the odds are 99% in your favour, there remains a chance that you won’t succeed on any given occasion.
What you need to know when you’re preparing to conceive consists of actions you can take to give you the best possible odds of success. It’s vital if you have any challenges to your fertility, such as low motility in sperm, or conditions like PCOS that affect the menstrual cycle, but it can also help if you’re in perfect reproductive health.
The Right Time to Conceive
One of the most important things you can do – especially if you have irregular menstrual cycles – is to make sure you’re trying to conceive at the right time. The period when the lifespan of an egg and sperm have the potential to overlap is known as your ‘fertile window’ – the time in each cycle when you’re able to conceive.
The key to pinning down when your fertile window will fall is identifying when you’re going to ovulate. Ovulation and fertility are closely linked – after you ovulate, the resulting egg is fertile for a maximum of twenty-four hours, and often less while sperm can survive as long as five days after ejaculation!
If you can identify when you’re ovulating, you know you are inside your fertile window and need to try to conceive that day for a boosted chance of success.
Predicting Your Fertile Window
You can give yourself an even bigger advantage if you can not just identify when you’re within your fertile window, but predict when it’s going to happen!
Using an advanced fertility monitor doesn’t just make it easier for you to chart the data involved, be it the rise and fall of your hormone levels, or your basal body temperature. Many modern fertility kits are linked to algorithms that can turn the mounting quantities of information about how your body behaves into accurate long term predictions of when your fertile days will fall, which gives you the insight you need to get pregnant.
