Hosted by Newlife IVF fertility specialists Dr Chris Russell and Dr Hugo Fernandes

Press play below to listen now or visit our YouTube channel to watch the live recording, along with our other webinars.

Topic summary

Falling pregnant naturally, even for couples with no barriers to conception, can take some time. But the good news is that there are a number of things you can do to help boost your chances of falling pregnant.

Here are our top 10 tips for boosting your chances of getting pregnant:

1. Make sure you are ovulating
2. Get the timing right
3. Have your doctor assess if your tubes, uterus and ovaries are okay
4. Undergo a semen analysis to check the quality of the male partner’s sperm
5. Avoid toxins
6. Optimise your diet and exercise
7. Consider supplements
8. See a fertility specialist
9. Consider intrauterine insemination (IUI)
10. Find out if IVF is an option for you

Transcription (first 9 mins):

Dr Chris Russell: “Good evening, everyone. Welcome to another Newlife IVF ‘Getting to the heart of fertility’ webinar. Tonight I’m joined by Dr Hugo Fernandes, one of our great fertility specialists, and I’m Chris Russell. And together, we’ll be taking you through our top 10 tips for how to boost your chances of getting pregnant – from us as fertility specialists, rather than ‘Dr Google’. Not that there’s anything wrong with ‘Dr Google’. But it’s good to get your information from reliable sources.

Tonight, we’re live on Vimeo. But we’ll be recording this webinar and it will be up on our YouTube channel in the coming days. And it will also be released as a podcast so that you can listen to it all over again, should you choose to, in the privacy of your car or wherever you like to listen. So thank you for joining us, we’re about to get started. And so without any more jabbering on by me, let’s get into the tips.

So the first thing we talk about when thinking about getting pregnant is to make sure you ovulate. So to get pregnant, the requirements are reasonably straightforward, although at the same time incredibly complicated. But the main requirements are to have eggs, to have sperm, to have a uterus, and to have good fallopian tubes. So our first tip is tomake sure that you ovulate. And I guess the question you might ask is: ‘How do you know if you ovulate?’ One way is to look at your cycle length. And generally women who have a cycle length between 25 and 35 days, are generally ovulating. So you can be quite confident of that.

The other way to look at it is to see if your cycle is regular: does it pretty much come at the same time each month? If it does, that supports the fact that you’re ovulating as well. You can also look for physical signs. And by that I mean you might get signs of ovulation; you might get some pain in your pelvis at the same time each month, usually about two weeks before your period comes and that might indicate you’re ovulating. You also might notice that there’s changes to your cervical mucus. So you might notice that your mucus becomes a little bit clearer, a little bit stringier and that indicates that ovulation is about to occur in the coming days. So there are physical signs.

You can also use tracking apps, which they’re a dime a dozen these days, and you can get them on your phone. And you can plug in the time of your period. And it will predict based on what it’s seen from your cycle over the previous month, it will predict the day in your cycle on which you’re ovulating. The way that it does that is fairly straightforward. It sort of averages your usual cycle, figures out what the cycle length usually is, and subtracts 14 days. So generally you ovulate about 14 days before your period comes. So that’s how the cycle tracking app works.

There’s also temperature charting, so you can take your temperature at the same time each day. And what you might notice is that before you ovulate, the temperature levels you get are fairly even and then at the time of ovulation, they just jump up by a fraction of a degree. And if you’ve got a really accurate thermometer that can detect that as well. The other ways (as there’s uncertainty based on all these things) is you can always have formal tests and if you see doctors who do assessments of whether you ovulate, what they will do is either do a blood test, usually halfway between the time that you ovulate and when your period is due. So about a week after ovulation, or a week before your period, sometimes called the Day 21 test, although it’s not done on Day 21 for everyone. But that’s a good time to do a blood test and will show whether your progesterone hormone has risen to an adequate level. And if it has, that confirms ovulation. Ultrasounds can sometimes be helpful too. Because when you have an ultrasound in a good ultrasound clinic, they’ll take a good look at your ovaries. And they can see some signs that either ovulation is about to happen, or that ovulation has already taken place. So the ultrasound can be useful as well.

The other crucial element in thinking about ovulation is thinking about your egg numbers. And I’m sure everyone is aware that with age, our egg numbers do reduce. So it becomes incredibly important that not only do you ovulate, but that you’ve got a good supply of eggs, because we don’t want you to have just one chance of getting pregnant this month, we want you to have next month and the month after that, and the month after that. And that’s possible if you’ve got good ovarian reserve. It becomes a little bit risky if you’ve got low ovarian reserve to continue trying for natural pregnancies if the egg numbers are low, because you want to use your best months to get pregnant with the most efficient way of getting pregnant. So it really is important to get your egg numbers checked. And unfortunately, there’s no way really that we can assess your egg numbers, or give you tips on how to do that.

One way is to use your age. But you know, there’s a lot of variability in egg numbers based on a woman’s age – there are some women who have really good egg numbers, while there are some women who are the exact same age and have very poor egg numbers. So there is a lot of variability. So we do recommend that if you have been trying to get pregnant for a little while, and generally if you’re watching a webinar like this, or listening to a podcast like this, that tends to mean that you’ve been trying to get pregnant, that it might be worth having your ovarian reserve assessed by doing an AMH test, which some of you might have heard of, or by doing a pelvic ultrasound scan, that actually takes a look at your ovaries, and is able to assess the number of eggs that are available within it.”

Visit our YouTube channel to check out our full suite of webinars. Our hosts cover a range of fertility topics relevant to single women, heterosexual and same-sex couples. You can also check out our new podcast series here.