I sometimes hear from women who want to know what their husband or partner should be doing to help to get the gender that they want when they are trying to conceive. One of the variables that I sometimes get asked about is warm or hot showers.

I heard from someone who said: “I’ve heard that if a man takes a very hot shower before having sex that this will help to get a girl baby. Is this correct? Or the hot shower advice for trying to conceive a boy baby?”

The thinking behind this advice is that the heat of the shower will lower the man’s sperm count. And as this process happens, more Y or boy producing sperm would be killed off because those sperm chromosomes are weaker. So, along this same line of thinking, the theory is that the sperm left after the hot shower are more likely to be girl producing. Thus, if the theory is correct, it would make a girl baby (not a boy) more likely.

I see the logic of this kind of thinking but I believe that it’s not entirely sound. I will tell you why in the following article.

A Man’s Sperm Can Be Affected By Temperature Changes, But It Has to Be Extreme: It’s true that sperm is very sensitive to temperature. It’s said that this is why a man’s testes are located outside of his body. However, it takes more than a hot shower to raise his body temperature, which is what is necessary to have a meaningful impact on sperm.

Now, if you were talking about a very hot sauna or about sitting in a hot tub for an extended period, these things actually might lower sperm count. But when you are trying to become pregnant, I would think that you would want a higher sperm count to increase your chances of conceiving. But more important than that, what a man does today affects his future sperm, not his present sperm, which leads me to my next point.

Sperm Takes 2 – 3 Months To Be Produced. Today’s Habits Only Affect Future Production: Only for the sake of argument, let’s say that the hot shower would affect the man’s sperm. The thing that you have to remember is that it take months for sperm to be produced. So if a man were to take a shower today, this would have an effect on the sperm that he’s producing months from now, but not in his immediate future. So having a shower before sex is not going to have any affect whatsoever on the sperm that is going to be released on that same day in an attempt to conceive.

That’s why this theory isn’t sound in my opinion. Not only is a hot shower not enough to lower sperm count, but even if it did, it would affect what happens months in the future. So to answer the question posed, there are old superstitions which suggest that a man’s hot shower before conceptions favors a girl baby, but there’s little science to back it up.

And, if this couple wanted a girl, the better idea would be to have sex before ovulation when the woman had an acidic PH and avoided also orgasm. These things have an immediate and meaningful effect. Plus, with this method you are able to keep the sperm count high to give the highest chance of success. Remember that each sperm chromosome increases your opportunity for pregnancy so you should want to have a high count, not a low one.