Trying to conceive is made all the more difficult if your menstrual cycle is irregular and your periods come and go as they please. The best way to work out your optimum time for conception is to use an ovulation test and then to time your intercourse to coincide with the release of your egg.

What an ovulation test does is it detects luteinizing hormone – LH. As your cycle approaches ovulation, there is a brief surge in LH, to prepare your body to release eggs from your ovaries. By detecting elevated LH levels, the test kit will help you identify this surge and determine when you will ovulate.

Ovulation test kits work differently to pregnancy tests. When your body is experiencing an LH surge, the test band will show a result that is of equivalent or greater intensity (similar color or darker) than the control band. If the result is negative, the test band will be lighter in color than the control band, or may even be invisible.

Another way that ovulation test kits differ from pregnancy tests is the time of day when they should be used. Rather than using a urine specimen from first thing in the morning, for an ovulation test, you need to use urine collected in the afternoon. This is because LH synthesizes in early morning. Late afternoon to mid-evening is an ideal period of time to test your urine. Determine a time of day that suits you most because it’s always best to take the sample at the same time every day. Decrease your intake of fluids for about two hours before testing because otherwise your urine will be sufficiently diluted to compromise the LH levels you are trying to detect.

Before you start using an ovulation test kit, you need to know how long your menstrual cycle is. You always calculate the cycle counting the first day of bleeding as day one so the length of your cycle is the number of days between the first day of bleeding of the preceding and following cycles. Ovulation occurs at the mid-point between them but if you refer to the cycle chart provided with the test, you can work out which day you should begin testing.

Once you use the test and have identified the LH surge, you’ll know that you will ovulate within 12 to 36 hours. Plan to have intercourse on the day of the LH surge and on each of the following three days after that.

Ovulation predictor kits are not to be confused with the kinds of results you can get from taking your basal body temperature. Once your basal body temperature is elevated, it means that your LH surge has already come and gone. Predicting ovulation in advance with a test kit will enable you to determine with certainty when you are most likely to conceive.

Posted in Trying to Get Pregnant

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