The Menstrual Cycle: Get Pregnant Tracking Ovulation
One of the main reasons that many couples fail to get pregnant within the first few months of trying has nothing to do with fertility or infertility and everything to do with timing. Because eggs and sperm only have a short life and because a woman’s body only releases eggs once a month – and that’s if she’s on a normal, healthy cycle – fertilization can’t occur throughout the month. If you want to get pregnant, you should learn to track your menstrual cycle. Get pregnant a lot faster by using this method!
A Quick Overview of Your Fertility Cycle
Here’s how the female body works, in a very brief and simplified format. When a woman is born, she already has all the eggs she’ll ever produce inside her ovaries, but these eggs aren’t ready to be fertilized right away. They have to mature, and they do this one at a time. It takes an entire menstrual cycle for an egg to mature, be released, and either become an embryo or be reabsorbed into the body when it isn’t fertilized.
At the beginning of your menstrual cycle, which is the first day of your period, your body is cleaning itself out and preparing to try again to get pregnant. Right after your period, you produce more estrogen, which stimulates the maturation of eggs. When an egg is ready to go, it is released into the fallopian tubes, and progesterone takes over to make the uterine lining ready to receive a fertilized egg. If the egg is fertilized, it implants on the uterine lining and starts drawing nourishment from your body, but if it isn’t it simply dissolves within twenty-four hours and is reabsorbed into the body.
The Menstrual Cycle and Conception
The fact that these two very different hormones – estrogen and progesterone – are at work in your body throughout your menstrual cycle makes your body send various signals that you can use to track your own fertility with the help of nothing but knowledge and a basal body thermometer, which basically takes a very specific, accurate reading of your temperature.
You can use a specialized ovulation chart to see when you ovulate so that you know when intercourse is most likely to result in pregnancy. On this chart, you’ll track your basal body temperature, which is your waking temperature before you even speak or get out of bed in the morning. Throughout the beginning of your cycle, your temperature will probably stay within a few tenths of a degree, but as soon as you ovulate, the progesterone will cause a noticeable spike in your temperature.
This “noticeable spike” is probably actually only going to be a couple of degrees of difference, which is why an ovulation chart is going to have you measure your temperature to the nearest tenth of a degree. On the day that you ovulate and for a few days before, your chances of getting pregnant are very high.
While you may not ovulate at exactly the same point in every cycle, knowing what your body’s signals are leading up to ovulation and knowing the normal rhythm of your menstrual cycles can help you get pregnant much more quickly. Instead of haphazardly trying to have intercourse every other day for months on end, you can actually use the knowledge that you gain about your body to determine when you are most likely to actually get pregnant.
For an ovulation chart (pdf format) you can download and use yourself for free, please click here to download.
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