Can females who are involved in competitive sports hurt their chances of getting pregnant or lower their fertility rate? Well According to ABC News , female athletes are a lot more likely to have menstrual disorders which slows down the pregnancy process. Also causing periods to stop which means the body can’t produce eggs without getting her body estrogen. Some athletes like runners, ballet dancers, gymnast, and swimmers starve themselves and end up with no body fat. You need 22% body fat to ovulate and be become pregnant. “44% of ballet dancers don’t have periods”
Olympic swimmer and 9 time medalist Dara Torres was training like every other olympic athlete but when trying to get pregnant her body failed her. A couple of years after her appearance at the 2008 Beijing games she slowed down her heavy workouts she conceived her first child Tessa. After Tessa being born she publicly admitted that Torres failed 7 fertility treatments. Some females that are training to hard their only chances to have a child is to get donated eggs.
When growing up I have always played sports and trained hard to play in college and in a professional setting. During high school I played volleyball, basketball, and track and threw in track. Over the summer I did soccer summer leagues so I was always doing something. Always trying to get in the “best shape” and most fit. Not saying I was trying to get pregnant in high school but just not wanting that to effect me long term and not being able to conceive.
For the overall topic I believe that to find the facts and the information from ABC would be experimental, but over time it became observational with college and professional athletes. The hypotheses would be that there are good things to working out and bad things to over working out. The (x-variable ) would be the female athletes, the (y-varible) would be the excessive workouts. Null hypotheses is that working out excessively has no effect on trying to have children. Are there chances with this i don’t believe so. Third variables being found would be not eating certain things you should be rather it is health or unhealthy.
Sources:
https://www.genesisfertility.com
https://www.asrm.org/detail.aspx?id=2322
This post really made me think “wow.” To imagine you need 22% body fat to be able to conceive is difficult considering the physical demands of being a professional athlete. During the olympics i’ve alsways heard stories about how gymnasts don’t grow well and get there periods later in life which is a scary thing to think of. A study was conducted to find the relationship of gymnasts to characteristics like height, puberty, and maturation. These claims support the difficulty you mentioned of not only being a female athlete but a male athlete as well.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3751410/