"If you're 35 or older, you should see a fertility specialist after six months of trying without success," Dr. Most couples trying to conceive the old-fashioned way should wait one year before seeing a fertility doctor, but in some cases, it's best to make an appointment sooner rather than later. The best bet is to have as much sex as you feel comfortable having and use your ovulation calendar to help guide the optimal times.
There is also the risk of creating stress by forcing yourself to stick to a schedule. What's more, "it's easy to miss the fertile period if sex is limited only to when you think you're ovulating because many people believe they're ovulating when they actually aren't," says Samuel Wood, MD, medical director at The Reproductive Sciences Center in La Jolla, California. Indeed, while holding off on sex can increase sperm count, it can also decrease sperm motility. But abstaining too much can throw off conception odds. You may think that cutting down on sex to "save" sperm-or only having sex during ovulation-will make getting pregnant easier. But that's not to say that you can't maximize your chances of getting pregnant by having sex more than once during your fertile window. When you're trying to conceive, when you have sex is more important than how often you have sex. There is no magic number of how many times you have to have sex to get pregnant. The kit looks similar to a pregnancy test, but instead of looking for the pregnancy hormone hCG, it is searching for a surge in luteinizing hormone (LH), which precedes ovulation (and, as a result, can accurately predict when you are most fertile). Seibel says that using an ovulation predictor kit (OPK) can give a more accurate answer. But many miss this, and some mistake their normal discharge is a sign of ovulation. "If you're in tune with your body, you may notice that you have an increased clear egg-white-like vaginal discharge a few days before ovulation," says Yvonne Bohn, MD, OB-GYN and co-author of The Mommy Docs Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy and Birth. Some people can detect ovulation symptoms. Many people follow the textbook "rule" that ovulation occurs 14 days after the first day of their period-but the reality is that cycle lengths vary, and ovulation doesn't always occur at the same time each month, says Machelle Seibel, MD, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.