when am i likely to conceive? what days should i have sex? these are questions i get asked almost on a daily basis in the office. the quick answer is the days right before and including the day you ovulate. the natural follow-up question is when do you ovulate? there are lots of tools you can buy to help you predict ovulation but let's talk about the low tech answer. most women ovulate 2 weeks before their next period starts. so you have to look backwards every month. if my period starts today i can be fairly sure i ovulated 2 weeks ago. if my cycles are regular (and i can guess within a couple of days when my next cycle is coming) i can predict when i will ovulate this month as well. first you want to look back over your last few month and see how long you cycles last. we count from the beginning of one cycle to the beginning of the next cycle (it's very important to include the number of days you bleed in this number or the count will be wrong). so what did you get? most of us will get a range for example: 26-28 days or 28 to 30 days. now take that number and subtract 14. for example if i had 26-28 days i subtracted 14 and now i have 12-14 days. so most months i will ovulate somewhere between cycle days 12 and 14 (cycle day 1 is always the first day you begin bleeding that month). to summarize if my cycles are 30 days long i ovulate on day 16. if 32 days long then ovulation on day 18. if 24 days long ovulation on day 10. since we are most fertile the days leading up to ovulation in my example of ovulating between days 12 and 14 i would want to have sex more frequently beginning around cycle day 7 but especially around days 10 through 15. how frequently between days 10 and 15? at least every other day but even daily would be fine. no worries about decreasing fertility by having intercourse too frequently for most men. but be reasonable we don't want this to become a chore! .
when is the best time to conceive?