Having sex TWICE a night increases your chance of getting pregnant (but not for the obvious reason)

Currently trying for a baby? Then you might be interested in some new research from China claiming that having sex not once, but twice in one night might just make those baby dreams happen quicker. Previously, it has been believed that it takes a man between 24 and 36 hours to 'replenish' his sperm bank after ejaculating, but now Chinese scientists have discovered that sperm collected three hours after a man has already ejaculated swims fastest and is most likely to fertilise an egg.

As well as this, the study showed that using sperm produced no more than 180 minutes after a man last climaxed can also boost IVF success rates by a third, which is a rather significant discovery.

Infertility is on the rise all over the Western world, where both lifestyle and maternal age are often being blamed for this, and recent figures show that around one in seven couples have difficulty conceiving in the UK, with stats being similar here in Ireland.

To conduct their study, researchers at Shengjing Hospital took semen samples from 250 men both a couple of days and several hours after they last ejaculated. They then compared the volume of sperm and their speed between the different samples.

And what they found was that sperm produced shortly after a man ejaculates has the greatest number of proteins that speed up their movement.

In a second part of the experiment, couples who were preparing for IVF were also assessed, and the men were asked to provide semen samples either several day or less than three hours after they last ejaculated.

Fertility doctors then proceeded as normal with the samples, before implanting embryos into the female partners.

Interestingly, the scientists found the IVF cases that used sperm ejaculated several hours after a man's previous climax were a third more likely to have a live birth. This, the researchers believe, could be because the longer sperm are stored in the testicles before ejaculation, the more vulnerable they are to DNA damage.