Male Fertility Protocol

Note: This is not medical advice. More so, a protocol I’m defining for myself, a 32 year old (self-diagnosed as quite healthy) male, looking to start a family soon.

Note 2: All of this discusses lifestyle factors rather than genetics. I’m leading with the things I can control first.

My wife and I just got back from our honeymoon.

Naturally, we’ve been discussing starting a family.

So to play my part, I’m creating a protocol to give us the best shot.

After all, pregnancy is 50/50. So at all times, I should be doing the best I can to support my wife and our future child.

Shorter Version

Keeping it simple, betting on general health principles being favourable for fertility.

• Food - Mostly a wide range of whole and nutritionally dense foods, avoiding alcohol and over processed food without being crazy about it.
• Movement - Daily movement, maintaining fitness (we’re both 7-8/10 fit already), weights, core, sitting on the floor.
• Sleep - Plenty of early morning sunshine/sunset exposure whenever possible, 7-9 hours, avoiding super large meals before bed, screens off at 9pm.
• Avoids - Smoking (all kinds), too much heat around the testicles.

First principles

The aim here is not to have ultra specific line items like “eat 3 walnuts at 9am every morning” or “dance naked in the afternoon sun” (despite how fun the latter would be), more so, general health principles which can be adhered to pre, during and post pregnancy.

As you could imagine, general health habits which create an overall healthy human system also align closely with a fertile system.

Food

Keeping it simple here. Majority whole foods, single ingredient foods, things you’d find at a farmer’s market or at your local butcher.

I adhere to this most of the time.

My biggest flaw is eating too large of meals before bed. I find this keeps me awake/disrupts my sleep.

I used to fast for large amounts of time but now I’m more of a “skip a meal here and there if I’ve eaten too much”.

Sometimes if I train and then finish late, I’ll skip dinner for a better sleep then have a bigger breakfast.

I’m trying to eat more earlier in the day and tapering off later in the day but I don’t always adhere to this.

I’ll stick to whole foods (fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, meat, fish, eggs, dairy) 95-98% of the time.

But if someone offers me birthday cake or a glass of wine at a birthday party, I’m not saying no.

Supplements?

Mostly marketing.

If you’re eating a wide range of nutritionally dense foods (eggs, fish, red meat, white meat, vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, olive oil), you’ll likely get the nutrients you need.

Movement

I’m a computer nerd so I spend quite a bit of time sitting.

But I try to break this up with some movement every 1-2 hours.

Pushups, air squats, punches, kicks, walking laps around the block/office.

I try to default to 10,000-12,000 steps per day as well as some other kind of training, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, weight lifting, calisthenics or running.

Though over the past few weeks, I only did plenty of walking and maybe 1-2 hotel gym workouts.

So a weekly movement checklist for the next 3 months might look like:

• Walking 10,000-12,000 steps per day (average)
• Running (hills/jog) 1x
• BJJ / wrestling 2-3x
• Calisthenics / weight lifting 1-2x

Rest days come when they need to.

The focus is to move every day by default.

I’d like to get better at sitting on the ground and moving around there for a long period of time too (in preparation for kids being on the ground). So I’ll spend plenty of time doing animal crawls, yoga, and just sitting on the ground with my legs in different places.

Sleep

I find I sleep quite well if the following conditions are met:

• Plenty of movement during the day (1-2 hours of movement is ideal)
• Smaller meal before bed (if I eat too big 2-3 hours before sleep I feel it coming back up)
• Screens off an hour before (swap the iPad for a physical book)
• Not too hot (I run hot most of the time, especially after intense BJJ sessions)

I’m addicted to screens.

For some reason ideas love to flood into my head after dinner. I’m a sucker for researching on my iPad new machine learning papers or blog posts right before going to bed. And yes I am guilty of bringing my iPad into bed.

Sleep is probably the pillar I should focus on improving most.

If I were a perfect person I would:

• Move plenty throughout the day.
• Eat a small meal for dinner (avoid going back for 2nds... or even 3rds let’s be real Daniel).
• Leave phones/iPads out of the bedroom, switch to physical books and textbooks (oo la la) after 9pm.
• Warm down as best as possible after training.

Avoids

Perhaps the most bang for your buck you could get for fertility would be to remove things that could harm it.

Again, I’m not a doctor but I do enjoy reading health literature.

And you’ll find no shortage of male fertility recommendations which say to avoid:

• Binge drinking. Ideally 0 alcohol but I’m on the side of a glass of wine once in a week or so is unlikely to harm.
• Smoking (including vaping, cigarettes and cannabis). My wife and I shared a cigar on our honeymoon. But outside of this, we don’t smoke at all. Okay okay... you got me, perhaps I’ll have a cigar once every 3-6 months. But I can cut this out. No problem sir.
• Testosterone therapy? Question mark here because I don’t have experience but I’m not on testosterone therapy so I’m ignoring this one for now.
• Excessive heat. Another one I don’t know too much about but makes sense when you think of anatomy. A human male’s testicles are on the outside of his body, likely to remain cooler than the rest of the body. So my guess is too much heat is harmful to sperm. Avoiding long sessions in the sauna or long periods of exercise where the balls get hot (marathon cycling or long BJJ sessions probably won’t help) probably help fertility. I’ll keep my balls cool when I can.

Extras

If I wanted to be scientist-level thorough, I’d get sperm testing done prior to trying.

That way if things don’t go to plan, we could test again and see what the numbers are.

But my bet is more on: take care of general health and the rest will take care of itself. My main assumption is that general health leads to favourable fertility.

I believe in my body to do what it needs.

Plus, I’m much more of a fuck around and find out (literally) kind of operator.

After all, this protocol is an experiment.

If it doesn’t work, my wife and I can revisit it and adjust.

My wife is following something similar but designed by herself with her own research and habits.

But many of the principles are similar: quality food, plenty of movement, adequate sleep, avoiding alcohol and smoking.

We’ve got no set timeline but we’ll check back here in 6 months and see where we’re at.

To our future child(ren), we’re looking forward to meeting you.

Resources

• The paternal role in pregnancy loss. A quote: “Additionally, paternal health, particularly metabolic syndrome, emerges as a noteworthy factor contributing to pregnancy loss.”