Alternative Therapies: Restoring Fertility Yoga DVD

I ordered these DVDs in May of last year, and I have been using them most days (I took a break for my surgery and recovery). Each workout is 35-40 minutes long and coordinated with your cycle. There are four phases: Menstrual, follicular (end of menstruation to day 10), ovulation (days 10-14) and luteal. They claim to treat a variety of conditions that cause infertility: endometriosis, PCOS, irregular ovulation, etc. The creators of the DVD are practitioners of Chinese medicine, which views infertility as the result of imbalance in the body. The goal is to balance the various energies in the body, after which fertility should result.

Each workout is short. Even on days when I'm exhausted and busy, I can usually squeeze in Fertility Yoga. Before my surgery, the workouts seemed to be alleviating my cramps a tiny bit. (It would be unfair to expect 30 minutes of yoga a day to dissolve a 10-cm adenomyoma.) I love all the twisting and hip-stretches in the menstrual and follicular phases.

The authors are very on top of their Amazon reviews, and respond to the questions and comments therein. This is how I know that these DVDs have the potential to help women with DOR, but it takes as long as 13 months for new follicles to emerge.

This is where my issues come in. These workouts are very mild, probably because according to Chinese medicine, exercising to the point of depletion is a bad idea when trying to conceive. All well and good, but the exercises were so mild that after a few months, I had lost a lot of muscle. (I am a thin person who must really work at muscle building. I've never had nor desired a rock-hard, muscular body, but I don't want to be skin and bones, either.) While you can do other kinds of yoga, between the end of menstruation and ovulation, for me that's only one week, not nearly enough to prevent loss of muscle. The luteal phase yoga, on the other hand, offers no challenges for stretching or resistance for two weeks of every cycle. Doing this for a couple of months would have been fine, but for more than a year? It didn't seem like a good idea to scale back my exercise so much for so long.

Now that I'm not letting infertility steal my soul anymore, I still use these DVDs on days when I have no other workout planned--about 3-4 days a week. I go to my Vinyasa class, even after ovulation (though only once or twice a week). I go swimming because nothing, NOTHING soothes my anxiety like swimming.

The authors are very insistent that menstruation is a vulnerable time when women are pre-disposed to overextending themselves. I take their advice and just do the DVD menstrual phase workout and no other, which provides a nice rest during my period.

****This post is a reflection of my own experience and does not constitute any medical advice to anyone.****