How to Start Planning for Pregnancy

Transcript

Dr. Todd Schad, Obstetrics and Gynecological Surgeon: So I think if you’re talking about or thinking about getting pregnant, where I would start off first is start by taking a good multivitamin. I would also encourage women to stop smoking if they smoke, decrease their alcohol intake, and then exercise is really important in trying to optimize your health so that you can then optimize the health of your pregnancy.

So, if you’re not exercising, even if it’s walking for 30 minutes, five days a week, I would encourage women to start doing that. Because a healthy weight is going to help with being able to get pregnant. Other things that women can do is trying to decrease their stress. I have found many times and I’m sure you have heard of women that have been trying to get pregnant and trying to get pregnant, they finally stopped and that’s when they got pregnant.

And it’s because they were causing so much stress inside of themselves that they were actually in some way preventing themselves from getting pregnant due to the stress levels.

There are two other things that I see happen that can help to improve the chances of getting pregnant that sometimes people are doing incorrectly. Sometimes people are having intercourse every night, but what happens is the male sperm count goes down each time. And if you’re having it every night, there’s not enough time for the sperm to recover. And so the actual amount of sperm that’s produced is much lower that second, third, fourth night in a row than it was on the first night.

So we actually recommend having intercourse every other night during those fertile days and fertile days are typically the 12th day of the cycle till approximately the 18th day of the cycle. And those are the most fertile days for the average woman that is ovulating.

The other problem that I sometimes see with people is they don’t have intercourse enough. If I ask them when are they having intercourse they say, “Oh, I have it once on day 15.” And if they happen to ovulate on day 12 or on day 18, that day 15 is going to miss the mark. And so sometimes not having intercourse frequently enough can be the problem.

So too frequent, too infrequent can both be issues that is an easy change for couples to make.

End Transcript

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