How Short Cycles Can Significantly Reduce Your Fertility: And what to do about it.
Short cycles can making getting pregnant much harder. Research shows that having a 26 day or less decreases the chances of conception by over 50%.
Lots of women have shorter cycles. Since it is just a few days, they think it isn’t really that big of a deal, BUT IT IS!
Once again; just because something is common, doesn’t mean it’s normal. Your menstrual cycle matters when we are talking about your fertility. It gives us so much information about how fertile our bodies are. IVF can only increase your chances of getting pregnant by 34% on average. So if you’ve got a short cycle, doing something that will buy you an additional 50% chance of getting pregnant is seriously worth considering.
How does my short cycle impact my fertility?
Let me give you a little background on reproductive physiology to make sense of this. Don’t worry, I’ll make it easy to understand. You probably know that ideally you ovulate on cycle day 14. This is the optimal time needed for the follicle (your unfertilized egg) to mature. Typically, in a *Conceivable cycle*, you will start your period 14 days after you ovulate which is why we consider a 28 day cycle the most fertile cycle length. Now if you ovulate early, say on cycle day 12, you will menstruate on cycle day 26. To be at its most fertile, your follicle needs the full 14 days to get ready for the next step. Any amount earlier and you’ve got an unripe follicle which, if fertilized, may compromise the quality and development of your embryo. You need a strong egg to make a strong zygote that will turn into a strong fetus and then become your strong baby!
A short cycle doesn’t mean you’ll never get pregnant, but it does make it more challenging
I’m sure there are plenty of women that get pregnant with a short cycle, however all the research says that the problem is big enough to compromise your fertility by over 50% and I think that is worth addressing.
Most women consider themselves either ‘fertile’ or ‘infertile’. I tend to think that they are either ‘more’ or ‘less’ fertile. There are over 25 factors that the medical research has shown to significantly decrease the likelihood of conception. If you work on even a few of those factors you can sometimes improve your chances of getting pregnant more than 50% and at the same time get a better cycle and get healthier. Win / win, right? If we can figure out what is causing your short cycle, and then fixing it is one of the easiest ways to up your chances.
Short cycles also can be influenced by your body’s inability to digest the food you are eating properly and turn it into the productive energy it needs to support your reproductive cycle. What? We often find that women who have short cycles are also seriously iron deficient, or sleep poorly, or exercise too much...or all three!
So, how these things fit together. When you have short cycles, you will also seen basal body temperatures are getting too high. That extra heat in the body dries up the eggs a bit and, more importantly, the cervical mucus which is absolutely necessary for conception to occur.
While individually these factors are not necessarily causes of infertility, when you combine the impact of each of them, it makes sense that your cycle is not doing what it needs to do to get a baby in your arms.
How you can set things right
We’ve done this for patients in our clinics for over 20 years. We take the time to meet with patients, figure out all of the factors that are impacting their cycles and create highly customized, multidisciplinary interventions to correct them. In fact, the women in our pilot last year increased their natural pregnancy rates by over 175%.
Want to learn more? Schedule a quick 15 min free chat with us here to learn more about how fertile your cycle is and what we can do to help!
Im rooting for you!
Kirsten