Guest Author - Holly Webster

The ultimate aim of a couple trying to conceive a child is for a healthy sperm from the male to connect with a healthy egg from the female, and to together start to form the embryo of a new baby child.

The very first thing you need, therefore, is a healthy sperm beginning its path, and a healthy egg waiting at the other end. If you are very young (say under 13) or on the older side (45 or older), there can be problems with this situation. A doctor should be able to test you to determine if, in general, you tend to have healthy sperm or eggs.

You can to some degree give your sperm and eggs the best possible chance of being healthy by keeping YOU healthy. A woman is born with all the eggs she'll ever need in her life. They wait in her ovaries until she reaches puberty, at which point they start being released monthly. This is the woman's menstrual period. Each month another egg is released, waits in the uterus to see if it will be conceived, and then flushed from the system if it is not.

The eggs waiting in the ovaries for their 'turn' are living cells, and could suffer if the body they're in isn't healthy. Also, the older the woman gets, the older the 'left behind' eggs are. Every year she waits, every single egg in her system is now a full year older. The eggs are less and less able to be fertilized. Eventually her menstrual system stops, and chances of pregnancy are essentially zero.

Men make sperm on demand, and this does not happen instantly. It takes a period of time for a man to build up a dense bulk of sperm to have the best chance of fertilization. If a man ejaculates his sperm and then tries to conceive an hour later, there will be less sperm in his system than if he had waited a week between ejaculations.

All sperm are not created equal. Depending on the health of the man when they sperm are created, this could affect their ability to fertilize an egg. Diet and nutrition can play a key role.

So now that you have healthy sperm and a healthy egg, it's time to coordinate their meeting.

The Cycle of Ovulation