Your menstrual cycle length and days

Here’s a breakdown of the phases (and their fancy names), which cover your menstrual cycle days:

• Pre-ovulation:
  After the last day of your period (around day 6 to 13), your ovary starts to produce oestrogens to ripen the egg. Your womb becomes bigger and full of blood to feed the embryo if you were to get pregnant.
• Ovulation:
  Around day 14 or 15 (and before your next period), the egg stops ripening and is released from the ovary into one of the Fallopian tubes.
• Premenstruation:
  If the egg is not fertilised by a sperm, it will break up and disappear. The lining of the womb is no longer needed and so is released through the vagina. This phase tends to last around 14 days and, once it is over, a new cycle begins.
• Menstruation:
  During this phase, a small amount of blood is released through the vagina along with the inner lining of the womb.

If you want to check your menstrual cycle length, mark the first day of your period on a calendar as Day 1 of your menstrual cycle days and count up to the day before your next period. Your period is part of the menstrual cycle and tends to last between 3 and 7 days.

The menstrual cycle length is normally 28 days, but it’s also normal for it to last between 21 and 35 days. It starts on the first day of your period and ends on the day before your next period.

The amount of menstrual flow that you lose during each period can be very different from one woman to the next, with the average amount being more or less what it would take to fill a teacup.

As you’ll have noticed, you won’t always have the same amount of flow, as it will vary from day to day, and is normally much greater at the start of your period than at the end.

90% of it normally comes out over the first 3 menstrual cycle days (this can also increase with age and depending on how many children you’ve had, as well as what method of contraception you use). So it’s a tricky business, and you must always choose the sanitary product with the right absorbency rate to suit your needs.

It’s amazing to think that we are born with around 250,000 eggs in our ovaries. Every time we have a period, one of them ripens, and so between menarche (your first period, as we normally call it) and menopause (the time of life when you stop menstruating), only some of them ripen. The unripe eggs are "stored" in the ovaries, two almond-shaped glands in the abdomen, near the uterus, or womb.

When an egg is fully ripe, it’s released from the ovary, and this is what we call ovulation. It then travels down through one of the Fallopian tubes into the uterus. If, during this journey, the egg is fertilised by the male sperm, it lodges in the lining of the womb (the endometrium).

In the uterine cavity (inside the uterus), it starts to grow, develop and mature into a baby up until the time of birth. If the egg is not fertilised, it is released, along with the lining of the womb, and they both come out of your body through the vagina during your next period.