Too Much of a Good Thing
Most of us don’t get too much exercise. When you’re trying to conceive, for example, getting a health amount of exercise on a regular basis will increase your chances of conception. Being just a few pounds overweight can affect your ability to get pregnant, and the more fit your body is the more ready it will be when the day finally comes.
Still, it’s possible to get too much of a good thing. We’ve all read the horror stories about women that eat too little and exercise too much. We think about anorexia, for example, and how it can impede your ability to become pregnant. We picture female bodybuilders, or we think about Olympic sprinters that are so muscular and thin that they have probably ceased to ovulate altogether.
The thing is, this doesn’t only apply to super-thin or super-fit women. You can exercise to the point where your body stops ovulating, even if you haven’t lost weight such that you’re in an unhealthy range.
According to some studies, more than about seven hours of aerobic exercise each week can lead to problems with ovulation. So, if you’re doing more than an hour of aerobic exercise each day, you could be interfering with your body’s ability to get pregnant.
This could be caused by a number of things. One possibility is that the increased exercise alters the production of certain hormones, which can lead to ovulation. It could also be caused by a reduction of production of progesterone during your luteal phase. In other cases, the decreased body fat and changes in diet can also affect ovulation.
It’s important to recognize this issue for what it is, however. Exercising for 30 minutes three times a week isn’t going to put you at risk. And, in fact, being overweight greatly increases the chances that you won’t be able to become pregnant. If your BMI is higher than 27, for example, you have an exponentially harder time getting pregnant than another woman in a similar situation with a lower BMI.
If you’re struggling with infertility, talk with a health care provider to help identify what’s really causing the issues.
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