Sport if you want to have children: yes or no?

If the desire to have children does not really work out after a while, many couples review their lifestyle to look for possible causes. Weight and fitness are also questioned. Do you do too little sport and do you have the corresponding “pads”? Or do you follow a very intensive sports program and regularly demand a lot from your body? Both can affect fertility.

Sport supports fertility

In general, there is nothing wrong with sport when you are trying to have children. Rather the opposite. Sport has the following advantages for your body in terms of your fertility:

• Physical activity promotes general health and stimulates the metabolism.
• Moderate exercise also regulates insulin secretion in women, which improves the hormone profile and can therefore support fertility.
• Getting enough exercise also helps reduce body fat. The female body gets 30% of estrogen from fat cells. If the body fat content is too high, hormone imbalances can occur, which can reduce the chances of conception. A balanced body fat percentage is therefore important in this phase of life.
• Sport not only promotes physical fitness in your partner, either. Regular training sessions increase testosterone levels in men and improve sperm quality.
• According to many medical experts, fit people also have more sex and thus increase their chances of conceiving.

Study proves negative effects of too much exercise

In a long-term study by the Norwegian University of Science and Technologyeven showed that extreme sports can have worse effects on fertility than smoking and age. The study asked 3,000 women about their sports and lifestyle habits and, a few years later, asked about their desire to have children and their successful pregnancies. It turned out that extreme sport had a clearly negative influence on the desired pregnancy. However, the study still gives hope to “exercise addicts”. Because the problems with fertility were not permanent among the women surveyed. If you reduce the excessive amount of exercise, the body obviously recovers quickly and after a short time you can no longer see any difference in fertility.

Too much exercise has a negative effect on hormonal balance

But why does a lot of exercise have a negative effect on fertility? Doctors explain this connection via exhaustion of the body and the effect on the hormone balance. Regular training to the point of exhaustion demands everything from the body. Since the body uses all its energy for regeneration, many other processes in the body are throttled for the time. This also messes up the hormonal balance. The menstrual cycle can become irregular. Oocyte maturation is negatively influenced. In extreme cases, ovulation can even stop completely for a while.

Exercise regularly if you want to have children, but in moderation!

If you want to get pregnant, it is therefore advisable to exercise regularly but not excessively. Endurance sports such as jogging, walking, swimming or inline skating are particularly suitable. But you can also practice movement and relaxation exercises such as yoga or gymnastics without hesitation. If you want, you can also combine your enjoyment of exercise with your goal of having children. With hormone yoga , for example, you can do something to get your body and your hormone balance in balance.