So the day has come where you and your partner decide it’s time to make a baby, you have sex and expect to be pregnant immediately. Disappointment can usually follow when your pregnancy test returns a negative result. We all think we know how to get pregnant, but there is a surprising amount of myth and misinformation concerning the topic.

Take the largest myth of them all, that to get pregnant you need to time intercourse for the 14th day of your cycle. This will only apply if you are one of the few women who has a regular, 28 day cycle. If, like most, you do not fit into this niche you are most likely going to be timing your intercourse wrongly every month and missing what is called your ‘fertile window’.

Cycle lengths can vary from anywhere between 21 and 35 days, sometimes even longer. Some women never even have regular cycles, so to base your plans of conception upon loosely based fact may well lead to disappointment month after month.

What could possibly cause the confusion is that ovulation commonly occurs 14 days “before” you get your period, so it is beneficial to keep track of your cycles so that, in a few months time you are able to predict when you might ovulate.

Some women have a luteal phase of only ten days, so if you are consistently counting backwards fourteen days from when you expect your cycle to end, you will always be having intercourse too early and missing the release of the egg. This, in black and white seems extraordinarily complicated and is why the use of an ovulation calendar is one of the most reliable ways to predict when you will ovulate, rather than relying on old wives tales.

The fertility awareness method uses ovulation calendars in order to help you pinpoint your fertile days from cycle to cycle. They take two to three months to build up a picture in order for you to predict the best time to have sex in the months to follow.

Learning about your cycles this way is very personal to you and if you want to answer the question you asked yourself on how to get pregnant for ‘you’, as opposed to relying on the general old wives tales, this is most certainly the way to do it.

Fertility awareness and ovulation calendars help you to visualise the affect that the hormone progesterone has on your cycle. By recording your temperature throughout the menstrual cycle and plotting it on a chart, you are able to see at which point in your cycle you are likely to ovulate and can time intercourse accordingly.

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