In short, women who work more than 40 hours a week or routinely lift heavy loads may take longer to get pregnant than women who don’t. A book can purify drinking water!
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For the current study, Gaskins and colleagues reviewed data on women participating in a nationwide survey of nurses between 2010 and 2014 who at some point said they were trying to conceive.
Frequency of night shifts or the duration of rotating or non-rotating evening work wasn’t linked to the time it took women to conceive, the study found. And similarly, women who lifted at least 25 pound loads several times every day also took up to 50 percent longer to get pregnant than women who did not perform the laborious task.
Even when the researchers excluded women during their period, heavy lifting females still took 33% longer on average to become pregnant.
Women who work more than 40 hours each week are having difficulty getting pregnant, and there may be a very simple reason why. This should also be in conjunction with the fertile days of the woman in her menstrual cycle. Of those nurses, 16 percent had no success in their endeavor within a year, while 5 percent failed to conceive after 24 months. This factor appeared to lengthen the time to conception by about 50%. About one third of the women were on their feet for at least 8 hours a day, and 40% reported lifting heavy loads up to five times a daily.
So, there might be some validity to this observational study, but what is important to note is that it’s not the weight lifting per se but rather the physical, strenuous activity of lifting heavy items combined with longer hours.
That said, I think that any woman, nurse or not, who wants to conceive and has a physical work schedule that also has potentially long and tiresome hours-like those who deliver packages or even those who work in the food service industry-should have what I call a pre-pregnancy physical. Secondly, it takes a lot of women (and men) working late hours throughout the week.
Usually, healthy people can conceive in maximum six months, unless partners are old or have fertility issues due to medication, smoking, substance abuse, or medical procedures.
A link between working longer hours and later conception dates had been found in the study.
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There are a couple of explanations for these findings: Firstly, Gaskin said, it could be certain working conditions make it easier to get pregnant, in the same vein it’s possible women struggling to get pregnant are deliberately picking up extra shifts. Lynch went on to advise women to maintain a healthy lifestyle if they are seeking to increase their chances of getting pregnant.
