Too Much Working Out Can Lead to Fertility Problems

Health specialists encourage regular workouts because even mild exercise is good for the body, even if most of the times not enough. However, a new study, cited by the Telegraph, comes to show that, with working out too, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Apparently, women sweating themselves to the point of exhaustion are three times more exposed to risks of not being able to carry a pregnancy through.

In theory, too much time spent at the gym means the body is drained by the energy it might need to sustain a pregnancy. By compensating, infertility can set in, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have determined, after conducting a study on about 3,000 women between 1984 and 1986. Ten years later, all women who were initially questioned in the survey were followed-up and asked about their pregnancies, as well as changes to the workout routines.

“Among all these women, we found two groups who experienced an increased risk of infertility. There were those who trained almost every day, and there were those who trained until they were completely exhausted. Those who did both had the highest risk of infertility,” Sigridur Lara Gudmundsdottir, who led the study, says for the Telegraph.

The research also took into account other determining factors such as age, weight, smoking, and alcohol use, but the conclusion was still the same: women who trained the hardest had three times more fertility problems than those who worked out only moderately. Luckily for gym fanatics, though, the study has also established that these fertility issues, which appear as a result of too much physical exercise, are only short-lived and usually go away by themselves if the routine is changed.

“Younger women appeared to be more vulnerable to the risk. Among the under-30s who exercised the most, a quarter were unable to conceive during their first year of trying, compared to the national average of roughly seven per cent,” the Telegraph says of the findings of the study.