Does Exercise Impact Fertility and Treatment?

What Does Moderate Exercise Mean?

Moderate means sustaining a level of activity where your heart rate is elevated, you’re slightly out of breath — but you’re still able to speak in short sentences. Getting up and getting moving is always beneficial for your health, but you might not be reaping the full benefits of your workout if you find you’re not quite at the moderate level. 

On the other hand, intense, prolonged and vigorous exercise can negatively impact fertility. Studies have shown that too much exercise can increase your menstrual cycle length (the time between periods) and follicular phase (the time between when your period ends and before you ovulate), while actually shortening the luteal phase (this is the critical phase where implantation occurs). If you find your menstrual cycle is impacted during times in your life of more intense exercise you might want to consider scaling it back a bit while you are TTC.

Sedentary and extreme exercise are not good for those who are trying to conceive. With me so far? While you are TTC, as long as you haven’t been advised otherwise by your healthcare provider, use regular, moderate exercise to support your overall health and chances of conceiving.

But how does this guidance change for exercise during fertility treatments? Let’s dive in!

Exercising During IUI

Unless you’ve been told otherwise by your fertility specialist, during most IUI cycles you can continue with the regular, moderate exercise you enjoy. Like with trying to conceive, the research has shown that women who engage in strenuous, prolonged, vigorous activity over long periods of time often have reduced fecundability. The research on this topic has shown that it is the reduced energy availability resulting from the intense exercise that impacts your menstrual cycle and detracts from “the investment of energy directed towards pregnancy”.  Ensure you are maintaining adequate energy consumption through nutrition, regardless of your exercise level. If you are looking for more guidance, our fertility-focused plans are treatment and diagnosis specific (we have plans for Cycle Monitoring or Prepping for Treatment, IUI, IVF, and PCOS) and provide guidance on fertility-safe exercise and ideal nutrition for every stage of your fertility journey. Click here to find out more.

During Your IVF Retrieval Cycle You Should Avoid

• High impact exercise, like running, movements with jumping, etc.
• Sudden changes of direction, like a flip turn at the end of a swimming lap
• Twists, like in some yoga poses
• Inversions, again, as are done in some yoga poses or gymnastics

Your body is going through a lot during IVF. In addition to avoiding exercises that put you at risk for ovarian torsion, give yourself the care and rest you need. Try sticking with gentler, more restorative workouts during your IVF stimulation, like walking, yoga flows (without twists, binds, or inversions), and low impact movements. 

Our comprehensive IVF Fitness and Nutrition Program provides full guidance on exercise, with video-led workouts, for all stages of an IVF cycle.

As long as you have not been instructed otherwise by your healthcare team, regular, moderate exercise can be continued throughout the two-week wait.

However, if you have anxiety about working out while waiting to take a pregnancy test, try to balance the benefit of the exercise with the mental stress a workout may cause. If your regular 30-minute cardio workout is going to cause you MORE stress because you’re concerned about over-doing it, then you might find it better to take it down a notch during the two-week wait.

Instead of going for a run, try a walk. Instead of your HITT class video, try a yoga session instead.

Some women are worried that they are going to lose the fitness gains they’ve worked hard to achieve. Try not to worry. It took you a while to build up your strength and stamina to get to where you are at — it’s going to take a lot longer than two weeks to undo all the benefits your past exercise has given you.

Exercise is perfectly safe (and very much recommended) during pregnancy, so once you see those two pink lines you may feel more comfortable resuming some of your regular workouts.

So, there you have it! Regular, moderate exercise for fertility is the golden nugget I want you to take away. Exercise is a great form of stress relief, has a ton of physical and mental health benefits, and has been shown through research to increase your chances of pregnancy and live birth! Use modifications at key points in your fertility journey (i.e. IUI or IVF), and always listen to your body. Sometimes a little Netflix + couch can do wonders for you mentally, too!