Why Short Cycles Can Screw Up Your Fertility

Having a short cycle length can making getting pregnant really difficult. Even when you’re using IVF to conceive, having a 28 day cycle will increase your chances pretty significantly.

Lots of women, especially after age 35, start to 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. Everything about your menstrual cycle matters when we are talking about your fertility. We must pay attention to the changes on our bodies, they are so often telling us something. A decrease in cycle length of just two short days can decrease your chances of getting pregnant by more than 50%. That’s legit ladies! Even 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 a short cycle impact my fertility?

Ok, so we need a little background on reproductive physiology to make sense of this. Stay with me, 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. This does not bode well! To be at its best, 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!

Having 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? Figuring out what is causing your short cycle, and then fixing it is one of the easiest ways to up your chances.

Let’s talk about the whys of short cycles.

Additionally, short cycles 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.  We often find that women who have short cycles are also seriously iron deficient, or sleep poorly, or exercise too much...or all three!

You might be wondering how these things fit together. Let me explain: what’s happening with these short cycles is that the basal body temperatures are getting too high. That extra heat in the body dries up the eggs a bit and, more importantly, the cervical mucous which is absolutely necessary for conception to occur. It also makes it really hard for your spleen to do it’s job and create energy efficiently, and as I said before, having a short cycle also means that your egg doesn’t have enough time to develop. 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, but it is expensive and time consuming to do and that made it cost prohibitive for many women. So we built the tech version of our clinical program and made it even better and more affordable so we could help more women just like you.