Fact or Fiction? Use it or Loose it - does masturbating affect male fertility?
Updated: Nov 8
Masturbating is recommended by the NHS as good thing for healthy individuals to do, but could it actually be affecting your fertility?
There is a common myth that masturbating too much lowers your sperm count and therefore reduces your ability to get your partner pregnant. Unlike women, who have a fixed number of eggs, men’s sperm are continuously being reproduced every 3 months so it would be impossible for males to run out of sperm!
Sperm are held in the epididymis meaning that the longer a man abstains from masturbating the higher the concentration of sperm in his ejaculate. If sperm are held in the epididymis for too long their motility and morphology is reduced. Therefore abstaining from masturbation for long periods of time can actually be bad for sperm health.
However, over masturbation can reduce sperm count in each ejaculate as stores in the epididymis are continually depleted. One study found that the average semen samples of the 21 men who were asked to masturbate multiple times a day changed from a concentration of 64.4 million sperm per millilitre on the first day to 50.7 million sperm per millilitre on the fifth day however the morphology of the sperm was unaffected.
Overall, masturbating regularly is important for maintaining sperm health, however, make sure not to overcook it if you’re looking to conceive in the next month or so as sperm count may be reduced in the short term.
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