Shake Your Body! How Exercise Can Help You Get Pregnant—At the Right Intensity
This month is national physical activity and sports month, which is a good segway to summer. Let’s leave that winter-full of zoom meetings behind!
Physical activity is about movement that gets your heart pumping, muscles toning, and calorie burning. We’ve heard about why being fit is good for disease prevention, from heart disease to breast cancer. It also helps our mind stay in tune and ward off depression and anxiety. And if it’s on my blog, that means it has something to do with improving fertility.
Exercise is a natural fertility booster.
Don’t sit! Move or at least stand.
Exercise can help you have a baby if it’s at the right intensity.
Just pretend you’re Goldilocks and look for not too much, not too little, but just right.
“Just right” for fertility is a moderate amount of exercise at moderate intensity.
Which exercise is best for conceiving? Several studies suggest anything that is moderate in intensity. This might be Pilates, light jogging, brisk walking, biking, swimming, and yoga.
One study investigated individual and combined associations between physical activity (PA), sitting time (ST) and Body Mass Index (BMI) with self-reported problems with fertility in 7771 young adult women between the ages of 18-23 over a 15-year period. Researchers found that risks of infertility were exacerbated by high sitting time (all those zoom meetings and time at your computer), even in women with normal BMI. Sitting negatively impacts your ability to get pregnant even if you are not overweight. So move!
If you are working from home or at the office, I suggest mini-walk breaks, midday exercise, and a standing desk. You can get risers to convert your sitting desk to a standing desk whenever you wantor just get a standing desk if you are not converting your kitchen bar into your home office like I am.
Overweight and fertility
Being classified as overweight or obese increases risk for infertility for both men and women. Excess weight on your body not only impacts your ability to get pregnant, but can increase miscarraige risk and complications during pregnancy such as gestational diabetes.
Women with gestational diabetes are at a higher risk for preeclampsia, which is a dangerous complication.
To check your BMI, put your weight and height in the calculator here. This calculator is an average calculator for a relatively “average person.”
If you are an athlete and have more muscle mass than the average person, your BMI is going to show you’re higher on the scale since muscle weighs more than fat.
Underweight and fertility
The same rules about being overweight apply if you are very thin. Being underweight also negatively affects fertility. If you are underweight, you can impact your period or your period can stop altogether and you can stop ovulating. If you do get pregnant, you run the risk of nutrient deficiencies that can impact your ability to stay pregnant and the health of the baby.
How much weight is just right?
How much to weigh when trying to get pregnant is similar to the physical activity rule or what I call the “Goldilocks Rule.” You want to get it “just right” which means right down the middle. Not too heavy and not too thin. The bottom line is to eat a healthy, balanced diet with nourishing real food including lots of fruits and veggies, protein and complex carbs with limited added sugars, and no alcohol and caffeine.
A healthy balanced diet plus a moderate amount of physical activity are powerful natural fertility boosters.
How does this work?
Physical activity can impact your ovarian reserve
The good news: you can preserve your ovarian reserve by working out regularly.
This study examined the impact of moderate physical activity on ovarian reserve markers in normal weight reproductive age women.
Anti-Mullerian Hormone (AMH) is one of many blood tests used in fertility tracking to check a woman's ability to produce eggs that can be fertilized for pregnancy. AMH levels help show how many potential egg cells a woman has left. This is known as the ovarian reserve. Your ovaries can make thousands of eggs during your childbearing years, but that number declines as we get older.
A study found that better ovarian reserve profiles were observed in the physically active participants and moderate physical activity is related to improved age-specific levels of ovarian reserve markers.
If you combine nutrition for egg quality with exercise for egg quality you get a double benefit. This is why my clients get the full package—all the key lifestyle things you can do to improve egg quality and fertility odds.
Physical activity boost your man’s sperm count and fertility
Current research also proves that moderate exercise can boost men’s sperm count.
In a report by WebMD, author Dennis Thompson merges several studies and found that men who spent more than an hour and a half each week engaging in physical activity outdoors had a 42 percent higher sperm concentration than those who spent no time outdoors; and weightlifters who spent two or more hours a week pumping increase had a 25 percent increase in sperm count compared to men who did not lift weights.
Can too much exercise affect fertility?
Too much exercise is not a good thing (when it comes to fertility anway).
You might have heard, for example, that training for a marathon is not a good idea if you want to get pregnant—and that ‘s true.
While moderate physical activity can improve fertility in both men and women, many studies suggest that intense and vigorous exercise can do the opposite.
A research article in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine mentioned that those who engage in vigorous physical activity may have an increased risk for infertility due to stopping ovulation and possibly implantation failure. How does that work?
If you don’t have enough body fat, your body does not have the right hormones that it needs. Also, the stress of intense exercise impacts you as well. The Mayo Clinic stated that in addition to vigorous physical activity potentially inhibiting ovulation, it can increase cortisol and stress hormones and reduce production of progesterone, a hormone vital to fertilization of the egg and implantation of the embryo.
Which exercise is best for conceiving? And how much?
The official suggestion is to keep vigorous physical activity to less than five hours a week.
I’ve had a number of clients tone down on the Orange Theory or Crossfit and keep it to 2 to 3 sessions a week, max. I prefer 5-6 days of moderate exercise with a preference for pilates, yoga, light jogging, dance classes and biking to avoid the risk of negatively impacting fertility.
The added benefit: physical activity enhances your sex drive
Being in the mood is good for fertility. The positive impact of physical activity gets your endorphins flowing and improves your physical stamina—and both are needed for good sex. I talk about this in my blog on Sports Nutrition + Better Sex = Welcome to Functional Medicine Fertility.
Don’t forget your Tips to Enhance Your Sex Drive with specific foods that support a healthy libido.
Physical activity for pregnancy
When you get pregnant, going into pregnancy fit is helpful for having a healthier pregnancy and labor.
Staying fit during pregnancy will be important too. If you exercise during pregnancy you are more likely to have a baby with a healthy birth weight. Exercise also decreases the longer term risk of chronic disease for both mom and baby. This is why prepping your body fertility has a double benefit—a healthier chance to get pregnant and a healthier pregnancy with a healthier baby.
Want to figure out how to put it all together based on your health needs? Book an appointment today to get a personalized assessment and plan for fertility.