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Figuring Out Your Ovulation Period

Monitoring your menstrual cycle using methods like the Fertility Awareness Method is a great way to determine your ovulation period. And of course your ovulation period is your fertile period. That is, it's the days within your cycle when you are most likely to conceive. Predicting your fertility period isn’t necessarily that easy, though.

Many women don’t have regular menstrual cycles. In a situation like that, determining your most fertile period can be tricky if you were to rely on math and menstruation alone. But the Fertility Awareness Method gives you different ways to figure out your fertility periods.

What is a Fertility Period?

The fertile period in a woman’s menstrual cycle is said to fall in the middle of that cycle. This fertile period begins three days to a week after the last day of menstruation and lasts one week to ten days. It’s during this weeklong window that a woman ovulates.

Ovulation itself doesn’t actually take that long. For women who don’t have a clear indication when they have ovulated, it's helpful to use this timed window as an ovulation “period”. It's a way of estimating when ovulation might have occurred.

Ovulation begins when a woman’s egg cell -also known as an ovum- is released from the ovaries and starts to make its way through the fallopian tubes toward the uterus. Some women experience mild abdominal pain or breast tenderness when they ovulate. This simplifies the process of figuring out the woman’s fertile period. Most women are fertile two to four days before, and two to four days after ovulation.

At What Age Is a Woman's Most Fertile Period?

Generally, women are most fertile during their late teens to late twenties. The chances of pregnancy start to decrease steadily once they reach thirty, though. This happens because the quality and quantity of her egg cells start to go down with age.

Nowadays, many women choose to concentrate on their careers first, and then have children later on in life. This is often a wise choice, but also makes conceiving later in life more of a challenge.

If you opt to have children after thirty, you’ll probably have more trouble conceiving. Don’t worry, though. Unless you have other medical problems affecting your fertility or you haven’t hit menopause yet, you still have a very good chance of getting pregnant.

However, the later in life you try to do so, the more useful it is to employ methods and tools that help your reproductive efforts along. You’ll also have to be much savvier about your own body and your fertility periods. This is where methods like the Fertility Awareness Method are a great help in figuring out your fertile period.

How To Determine Your Ovulation Period

The Fertility Awareness Method presumes that you have a relatively regular menstrual cycle over 25 to 35 days, or about a month long. Your fertility period is your ovulation period which generally takes up around one third of your cycle.

The Fertility Awareness Method is simplicity itself. You use a calendar to record the days in your menstrual period. Monitor your cervical mucus levels using a speculum and check your basal body temperature with a special thermometer available exactly for this purpose.

There are a number of online resources available that show you how to determine your fertility period. Keep alert and committed to monitoring the period when you’re most fertile because this is a really effective natural family planning method. Follow it and it will be a big help when you decide you want to conceive.

The previous article tells you How To Improve Fertility.

Other wiki resources:  improve fertility; ovulation period; infertility causes; preparing for pregnancy; getting pregnant