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Preparing your body for a baby can be such a convoluted process in order to find that ‘Goldilocks’ zone – do this, do that, DON’T do that. But while we talk about the importance of exercise all the time, are some of us overdoing it when it comes to fitness and fertility!? Is it a thing? We asked Dr Andrew Murray, Medical Director at Fertility Associates, for his expert opinion on over exercising.

Hi Dr Murray, thanks for having a chat! So, we hear a lot about women not exercising enough being detrimental to fertility – but what about the dangers of over exercising? Is this a thing?!

So when it comes to exercise and fertility, it’s quite similar to a lot of things and that all things in moderation are probably fine. But it’s when you go to the extremes of excessive exercise – that’s not a good thing.

But there are some specific things about exercise that are probably worth highlighting. Let’s talk about the extreme, real intense over exercising. One of the reasons that women will sometimes come to see me is because their periods have disappeared altogether. What’s going on at a physiological level is it’s almost like the body’s been tricked into thinking, ‘are we in a famine here? This is not a good time to reproduce, because all the calories are being diverted into recovery and energy.’ The brain shuts down the reproductive hormones that it sends to the ovaries – it says ‘right, well hang fire, ovaries don’t release any eggs because there’s no food around at the moment, this is a bad time to reproduce.’

The medical term for this is called Amenorrah, which just means no periods. Now, having no periods in and of itself doesn’t mean your eggs are damaged- they can just be sitting there waiting for the next call-up.

Does low estrogen have anything to do with this?

One of the other important jobs the ovaries have is to produce the hormone estrogen, and an estrogen such an important hormone for women because it’s what helps provide the elasticity to the vagina and helps keep the skin supple. If you have low levels of estrogen, your brain doesn’t function as well.

Now, if we turn that back around to women who are trying to conceive, the concern is if your periods are absent, it also means your ovaries are very shut down. You’re not ovulating. But, the positive thing goes it’s all completely reversible by reducing training levels, and ensure that the lean body mass is not so low – typically we talk about the magic standard is no less than 50 kilos. There’s no one-size-fits-all with us, but above 50 kilos for most women is going to be the sort of minimum weight we would want people to be to expect normal ovarian function.

So are we just talking about professional athletes here, or is this something that can affect everyday women – sometimes without them realising?

There is a level down from what I’ve just described tat I think sometimes needs to be reviewed. So these would be women who are, say, going to the gym five to six times a week. That’s doing several rounds of stuff like high intensity training. There’s been a couple of studies now that show that this can be harmful – it’s counter intuitive, I know – you would think that someone who’s motivated and doing that level of training would have better fertility outcomes because they’re not the ‘overweight ‘patient that we often think of as having fertility problems. But the fact is that gym junkies tend to have lower pregnancy rates in IVF programs.

It sounds like it’s quite hard to get to the sweet spot – are we just talking high-intensity stuff here?

The reason why we think that’s the case is that with high intensity training at that level, you’re getting literally no break of significance and you’ve got constant and chronic inflammation going on in the body. That’s how the training is working – you’re stressing the muscles and the tendons. And you know, we’ve all experienced that soreness and slight heat when you’ve particularly done a new exercise. Well, that’s inflammation, which is what ultimately is repaired by muscles and what makes you stronger.

But if it’s done consistently, that level of inflammation is circulating around the entire body, and there is some thought that it may have an inhibitory effect on the embryos. Again, it comes back to that age-old advice – all good things in moderation. If I’m seeing someone who’s exercising six times a week or more, I’ll say to them, look, let’s mix it up a bit – instead of six high intensity training sessions a week, why don’t you swap a couple of those out for a long walk in the bush, maybe do some meditation or some yoga or something that’s a little less full-on.

So, it’s a case of keeping inflammation low, and everything else in moderation?

Yeah – this is why diets that are rich in antioxidants are so useful and powerful because the goodies in antioxidants help repair the damage that is caused by inflammation – when I say that, I don’t mean go out and buy a bunch of supplements. I think a good healthy diet with plenty of green leafy vegetables – the Mediterranean style diet is one that I think is a very good one for this kind of thing and for fertility in general.

This story was brought to you with the support of Fertility Associates and as part of our ongoing partnership – click here for our previous instalments.

We feel like such an ordinary couple, we met mid 20’s and just followed the pattern all our friends were following. Marriage, a year overseas and home to buy our home – a small first home.

Then we began to save to have a child. It was fun trying for a child … for a while, but when nothing happened the fun went out of it. Finally we decided to go to our GP who was very nice and did some tests. Nothing showed so we were sent over to Hamilton Fertility Associates.

I remember that first time sitting in the waiting room feeling so scared as we watched all these people coming in to wait and see the doctor and others with labels walking through. We did not know then but we were going to get to know the labelled ones quite well. The wait took forever. I know doctors always give the person with them the time but we were about 30 minutes late and

by the time we went in were really tense. 

The doctor said we fell in the group of ‘unexplained infertility’. That felt so bad, if you don’t know the problem how can you fix it? Well, it got worse – not only that, but we hadn’t been trying for long enough to qualify for public funding. Anyway we were to do some more tests and if that changed it the clinic would let us know. More day 2 blood tests, then day 21 – I was just a pincushion. Another trip to Hamilton for a semen analysis – at least that was not my turn.

And then a phone call from the doctor, the sperm had enough antibodies (like little caps) that it was going to be hard for us to get pregnant ourselves.

It changed our scoring, public funding, hurray, and we would get a letter telling us what next. Sometimes 2 weeks of waiting for a letter is forever. If we knew about waiting what we do now we would have relaxed but our lives seemed to be around the letterbox. The letter arrived and we could plan for an IVF cycle with the sperm injection.

Wonderful and of course we would be one of the lucky ones, we had had our share of bad luck.

It was really scary going to Hamilton to collect drugs and have counselling. Of course we didn’t need counselling except the nurses really gave us a push. Thank goodness as we did need to sit down and talk about it all and that was our chance. We learnt a lot that day from the nurses and counsellor and met others at the education group. I am not sure how many couples go to the clinic but there are always different people in the waiting room and it is only at the blood tests you see the same people.

Anyway I joined the group in our area. We meet each month, its mostly women in our group and we have a good gossip, sometimes we go for a walk or do something else. It’s always good for me to do this, as women need to talk about things. That cycle didn’t work, so we had to use our frozen embryos. We read the book and it said a low chance of getting pregnant with frozen embryos so we were not too hopeful. 1st Frozen, 2nd Frozen, last Frozen…

We got a positive test, surely now things would be okay. We were so excited we told the world! We really wished we hadn’t when two weeks later we began to bleed and miscarried. Our emotions were all over the place. On one hand we knew we could get pregnant, on the other we would have to go through it all again. AND it was almost a repeat. We had a lot of trips over to Hamilton, firstly for the IVF cycle, and then to have the fresh embryo put back, then a review and then a frozen cycle. We are pregnant again, from a frozen embryo and the difference this time is we have two embryos remaining still, just in case. I don’t think we will tell anyone this time until the 3 months is up, it’s too hard untelling them. We don’t plan or talk about it too much as even that feels scary. We do tick off every day and feel glad about another day without blood.

Maybe, just maybe...