Spring training might be over, but your sperm is just getting warmed up.
While preparing for conception has historically been considered a woman’s burden, evolving research shows that infertility is the result of men’s biology roughly half the time.
A new startup aimed at “sperm optimization” wants to help men harness their virility with a program designed to improve the quality of their swimmers and boost their chances of fertilizing an egg — though it often comes down to basic healthy lifestyle choices, doctors say.
For the best chance at healthy sperm, men need to eat right, get enough sleep, exercise and manage their stress. Excess drinking and drug use aren’t advised, either.
“What’s good for your heart is good for your penis and testicles,” Northwestern Medicine urologist Dr. Nelson E. Bennett Jr. said in a 2024 press release. “So, do what the cardiologists say to do. Eat a Mediterranean diet with plenty of fruits, vegetables, simple grains and clean protein from fish and chicken. Not a lot of red meat.”
But timing is everything.
Gigi Brett, founder of sperm donor recruitment platform PreSeed and preconception health company Upstream, tells The Post that these lifestyle changes are especially impactful during the sperm development cycle — a roughly 74-day window — to produce the best results.
“The idea is to intervene while new sperm are being created,” she says, to try to correct for different factors related to hormonal imbalance, inflammation, oxidative stress and poor metabolic health.
Sperm, she explains, “isn’t static.”
“It’s constantly regenerating, which means quality can shift based on health, lifestyle and environment.”
Getting your swimmers in shape
The 10-week “preconception plan” she devised for her clients is tailored to each individual’s health status, and timed to the sperm cycle.
The plan, which runs between $950 to $1,500, typically involves a combination of nutrition changes and dietary supplements, exercise guidance, sleep counseling and stress regulation — all with the hope of optimizing sperm.
That could mean faster or stronger swimmers, and an increased likelihood of conception. But better sperm has implications down the line, too — on fetus and baby health, and even the health of the mother.
A key metric in sperm optimization is sperm’s DNA integrity, Brett says, which is now thought to influence early embryo development and even miscarriage risk. The sperm also carries epigenetic signals that could “shape aspects of a child’s long-term health” depending on the father’s health in the lead-up to conception.
“The ‘preconception window’ is an active biological phase where a father’s day-to-day choices can shape both fertility outcomes and potentially aspects of a child’s future health,” Brett says.
The trouble with sperm
These breakthrough discoveries about men’s role in fertility and baby wellbeing are emerging at a time when sperm health is failing on a global scale.
Studies analyzing sperm count on every continent suggest that it’s been declining overall since at least 1973, with an even steeper drop-off in the years following 2000.
“Male fertility has been completely overlooked.”
Gigi Brett
The average sperm count is 75 million sperm per milliliter of semen, and the count is considered low if it falls below 15 million per milliliter, according to that same 2024 press release from Northwestern Medicine.
Some clinicians think sperm researchers may be slightly overstating the problem, including Bennett Jr., who said “we think there’s a trend toward a lower sperm count, but it’s not confirmed.”
Still, infertility is now estimated to impact one in every six couples worldwide, with poor male reproductive health to blame for close to half of those instances.
A sperm shortage
In the US, this also coincides with a serious shortage of donated sperm that’s left many of the thousands of couples seeking donations without a workable match.
Brett claims that PreSeed was designed in part to expand the donor pool and make the process more accessible to a wider range of both donors and recipients.
“The issue isn’t that there aren’t enough men willing to donate, it’s that the system hasn’t made it accessible or compelling for a broader group,” she says.
She hopes the Upstream and PreSeed platforms will not only bring in more potential donors, but also give them much-needed structure for how to prepare.
“Instead of choosing between quantity and quality, the model tries to increase both by bringing in more people and helping them show up in a healthier, more informed way,” she says.
She’s proud, too, that PreSeed and other programs like it are shifting the perception that reproduction is a “women’s issue” and not an everyone issue. Most fertility treatments, including IVF, are built around that outdated model, placing a lot of stress on women’s bodies.
Meanwhile, Brett laments, “male fertility has been completely overlooked.”
Time to whip that spunk into shape.
