Women who are trying to conceive know that they are the most fertile during ovulation. The best time for conception, then, is when a woman is ovulating and the few days just prior. For this reason, women have used a variety of different methods and tools to try to find out when ovulation has occurred, and to try to predict when ovulation is going to occur during their next cycle. One of the techniques women have used in regard to ovulation has to do with tracking changes to basal body temperature.

Basal body temperature is the lowest temperature that the body has during any given day. For this reason, basal body temperature should be taken the very first thing in the morning, preferably before a women even gets out of bed. To take your basal body temperature, you will need a special basal body temperature thermometer that is capable of accurately measuring your basal body temperature to within one tenth of one degree.

By tracking basal body temperature throughout your cycle, you can know when ovulation has occurred. The reason for this is that there is a slight spike in your basal body temperature after ovulation occurs. Your basal body temperature will rise somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6 degrees after you ovulate. Identifying when this spike occurs can tell you that ovulation has already occurred.

Of course, knowing that ovulation has occurred doesn’t do much good by itself. By the time you are able to record the increase in basal body temperature, ovulation is over and you are not fertile. For this reason, some women choose to chart their basal body temperature from one cycle to the next, in hopes that a pattern will emerge. For example, if you experience a rise in basal body temperature on the sixteenth day of each cycle, you can assume that you are going to ovulate on the fifteenth or the sixteenth day of your cycle. You can then time your attempts at conception around this knowledge.

Using basal body temperature to detect ovulation is especially effective when used with other techniques, such as charting changes to your cervical mucus.

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