Will ejaculating too often boost your fertility, or hinder it? Is there a certain number of times you should masturbate per day, week, or month to maintain optimum fertility? Does masturbation affect sperm count?
When it comes to masturbation, it's completely normal to wonder — what is normal? Let's break down the facts to understand whether masturbation affects fertility.
This is especially relevant if you are in the process of trying to get your partner pregnant (known as trying to conceive or TTC).
To understand how frequent ejaculation affects fertility, we need to get back to basics and talk a little about how you make sperm. Sperm production (spermatogenesis) begins during puberty and continues throughout your life.
The testes produce around 50–100 million viable sperm every single day. At first, the sperm cells are immature, and unable to swim. They go through a series of divisions as they mature — which create genetic variation — and they eventually become able to move on their own. It takes approximately 74 days for a newly formed sperm to become fully mature.
The body stores mature sperm in the “cauda epididymis,” a structure in the epididymis — a tube at the back of the testicles. When you ejaculate, sperm moves via muscle contractions to the vas deferens. The vas deferens connect to the seminal vesicles, which produce seminal fluid (semen). The sperm mixes into the semen, and then moves to the urethra for ejaculation. When you orgasm, this leads to ejaculation, releasing the sperm and seminal fluid.
If you don’t ejaculate, what happens to your sperm? It sits in “storage” for a while — more on that below — and then is eventually reabsorbed by the testes.
Now we know that sperm takes nearly three months to mature once produced, let’s discuss: Does masturbation affect male fertility?
If you are looking to improve fertility or increase low testosterone, you may have come across information about “semen retention” (intentionally avoiding ejaculation). Some people claim that avoiding ejaculation and “retaining semen” improves energy levels, fertility, sexual pleasure, and emotional health.
This concept has been around for a long time. But, there’s no scientific evidence to back up the claims — and in fact, abstaining from ejaculation for more than a few days is actually detrimental to your sperm quality.
Semen volume (how much semen you ejaculate) and sperm concentration (how many sperm are in your semen) do increase after 1–2 days of abstinence.
However, on the flip side, sperm quality, or the health of your sperm, has been shown to decrease after two days of abstinence, and worsen over a more extended period. And the genetic health of sperm suffers from longer abstinence windows.
We talked above about how sperm waits in “storage” until you ejaculate. While it sits, the motility of your sperm — meaning how many of them are swimming — drops, and sperm DNA fragmentation — the degree of damage to the DNA carried by your sperm — increases.
With this in mind, we recommend that you abstain from ejaculation and sex for 2–5 days before collection for in vitro fertilization (IVF), semen analysis (testing), or sperm freezing.
It really is a personal choice how often you choose to masturbate when you are TTC.
How often should you have sex if you’re trying to conceive? It’s less about how much, and more about when. You need to be pinpointing your partner’s fertile window, the 3–5 day period before ovulation, when pregnancy is most likely. Experts recommend having sex every 1–2 days during this window, especially on the day just before ovulation.
Taking into consideration the information above, it doesn’t make sense to “save up” semen for long periods of time before trying for pregnancy. So, masturbation before or after the fertile window shouldn’t affect your chances.
Ejaculating multiple times per day may reduce sperm count. So during the fertile window, when you’re having sex frequently, you might want to temporarily avoid masturbation.
Learn more in the Men's Guide to Trying to Conceive.
No, masturbation does not cause infertility in men (or anyone).
Your sperm count may be slightly lower if you’re ejaculating more than once every 1–2 days. So if you are TTC, doing IVF, doing a semen analysis, freezing your sperm, you should abstain from masturbating for 2–5 days prior. Between fertility treatments and during times when you are not TTC, masturbation will not do any harm, and can have several overall health benefits.
If you have a healthy relationship with masturbation (i.e., not an addiction), it does have its benefits. For instance, masturbation may:
Bottom line: Apart from a short-term impact on sperm counts, masturbation won’t affect your fertility — and there’s no evidence that avoiding ejaculation has any medical benefits. Have fun!
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