When you’re trying to get pregnant, you need all the help you can get. Even if you’re in good reproductive health, you could find yourself waiting a long time to conceive. Fertility is expressed as odds: your chance of getting pregnant in a given time. This means that there are no certainties and even with good odds, the possibility of failure exists. If you have any health conditions that reduce your fertility, you start with lower odds of conceiving and it’s even more important to counterbalance them.

Today we’re taking a look at some of the things you can do to raise your odds of conceiving successfully, which will help you get pregnant.

Get Your Timing Right

Timing is one of the most important factors in boosting your chances of getting pregnant. You can actually conceive for a surprisingly short time each month – or rather, each menstrual cycle. If you aren’t tracking your fertility then yes, you do need to be careful, as you could get pregnant at any time. But if you know when you ovulate, then you can pin down your fertile window to the five days before this and then day after.

It’s only in this time, this ‘fertile window’ that sperm can survive long enough to reach the egg while it’s still fertile. It remains viable for only twenty four hours after ovulation, and sperm can survive up to five days in a woman’s body after sex. This gives you a six day fertile window.

The traditional method of identifying when you’re fertile is to track your basal body temperature with a thermometer, but a modern fertility kit can give you more accurate answers, and take away some of the work.

Diet

Making some small adjustments to your diet can really raise your chances of conceiving more quickly. Adding more leafy greens to your meals helps women maintain regular periods – making it easy to identify the fertile window as above – and also boosts the nutrients that go into building health, long lived, fast moving sperm, making it more likely they will reach the egg and fertilise is successfully.

Exercise

Regular exercise is important to maintain a good level of general health. This supports every function of your body, including regular ovulation, and good egg and sperm health. It also makes pregnancy less risky, helping you to avoid some of the complications that come with putting your body under a large amount of stress!

It’s important to ensure you’re exercising sensibly and in moderation though. Intense exercise – if you’re not used to it – can interfere with your fertility. It stresses your body, which can make it appear like you are living through a dangerous time. Stress hormones, whatever their source (the benign stress of intense exercise, the usual stress of a busy period at work) all look the same to the body, and they can interfere with your menstrual cycle.