Couples often take longer than expected to conceive because conception can only occur during a female’s fertile window, providing about a 20% chance of conception each cycle. And the fertile window can be tricky to identify. But tracking certain bodily signs and symptoms can help accurately determine when you’ll ovulate and increase each cycle’s chance of conception. Entering data to your Ovia account will help you zero in on your ovulation so closely that you’ll be able to predict it to the minute!
How to track data that will predict your fertile window
Your body has lots of different ways of communicating when you’ll be ovulating, and what you can do to increase your chances of conceiving.
Tracking your health and fertility data will help you identify certain patterns, trends, and signals that your body communicates to let you know when you might be ovulating. Monitoring your general health data will also help you keep your fertility strong, as you’ll be able to tell if something is hurting your chances of conceiving. There are lots of different pieces of data that make up your fertility puzzle, and you’ll get the most accurate predictions possible by tracking them all together. You’ll be able to build your own personalized road map to ovulation that you can follow each cycle by tracking the following data points:
- Cervical fluid (CF): Produced naturally by your body, cervical fluid starts out dry or thick at the beginning of the cycle, and trends towards thin and stretchy by the time ovulation rolls around. Simply insert a clean finger into your vagina, and observe the fluid you pick up by rubbing it between your fingers. Following the progression of your CF within a cycle can clue you in on when you’ll be ovulating.
- Basal body temperature: Basal body temperature, your lowest body temperature in any given day, tends to slightly dip just prior to ovulation, and will sharply spike immediately following. Logging the dip in temperature can help identify when ovulation is on the immediate horizon, and tracking the spike will help you zero in on your relative ovulation date from cycle-to-cycle. Basal body temperature is most accurately measured with an oral thermometer in the morning.
- Physical symptoms: During ovulation, individuals will often feel a bit of lower abdominal discomfort, known as mittelschmerz pain, so noticing the discomfort may mean that you are ovulating. Other physical symptoms may prove correlative for you, for instance, if you tend to get headaches in the days prior to ovulation. Logging your health symptoms from cycle-to-cycle can also help determine whether or not you conceived in any given one.
- Emotions: People often report feeling a bit more social or energized around the fertile window and ovulation. Logging your emotional symptoms from cycle-to-cycle can also help determine whether or not you conceived in any given one.
- Ovulation tests: Ovulation tests search your urine for the presence of luteinizing hormone (LH), the hormone that is released to instruct your ovary to release an egg. Taking ovulation tests can help let you know when you’re ovulating, but cannot tell you more than a day or two in advance, effectively halving your fertile window if you solely rely on ovulation test strips. Tracking the relative date of ovulation from cycle-to-cycle can also be invaluable in not just identifying, but also predicting your fertile window.
- General health indicators: Tracking general health indicators like nutrition, activity, sleep and blood pressure can help you get a read on how your lifestyle may be affecting your fertility one way or another.
Tracking with Ovia
While it is theoretically possible to track all of these data points by hand and determine an ovulation date, Ovia makes logging, charting, processing and analyzing your data an infinite amount easier, and more productive. Only Ovia’s ovulation prediction software takes all of these data points into account, and aggregates them across millions of data points, and tens of thousands of women, to accurately project your own specific fertile window. Ovia monitors your fertility and overall health to make sure that you are doing everything in your power to conceive.
Now that you know how to get pregnant faster, learn more about how to improve your fertility health to also help reduce your time to conception.
Read more
Sources
- Bruno Scarpa, David B Dunson, Bernardo Colombo. “Cervical mucus secretions on the day of intercourse: An accurate marker of highly fertile days.” European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology. Volume 125, Issue 1, Pages 72-78. Web. 3/1/2006.
- Sabita Sujan, John Danezis, Aquiles J. Sobrero. “Sperm migration and cervical mucus studies in individual cycles.” Journal of Reproduction & Infertility. 6(1):87-97. Web. Sep-63.
- Samantha J. Dawson MSc, Kelly D. Suschinsky PhD, Martin L. Lalumiere PhD. “Habituation of Sexual Responses in Men and Women: A Test of the Preparation Hypothesis of Women’s Genital Responses.” The Journal of Sexual Medicine. Volume 10, Issue 4, pages 990-1000. Web. 4/13/2015.
- Stephen R. Pallone, MD and George R. Bergus, MD. “Fertility Awareness-Based Methods: Another Option for Family Planning.” Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. vol. 22 no. 2 147-157. Web. March-April 2009.
