얼음으로 찬 고환과 버려진 속옷: 정자 최대화의 세계

Amid reports of an alarming decline in male fertility and changing attitudes about the role of men in preconception efforts, men are changing their lifestyles to support sperm health.

When Mick Owar and his partner, Holly, started discussing their plans to start a family, she shared her fears that perhaps infertility would be a problem.

Owar, 40, had a simple, yet confident response: “You leave that to me, love.”

The self-proclaimed former “gym head” had been keenly interested in nutrition and health, often using his body as a kind of experiment specimen. “There was a lot of testing things on myself,” the Oakleigh South resident says, clarifying, “from a biohacking angle, before biohacking was really a big thing”.

When it came to trying to conceive, he knew he’d take proactive steps to help. He stopped wearing underwear – “most underwear is made of polyester and that’s an endocrine disruptor and will lower testosterone” – and would ice bath at least once a week.

He ate a clean diet, including four to six eggs a day, along with a comprehensive supplement stack. “Eggs have most of what you need, but just to be on the safe side, I was taking extra zinc, extra magnesium glycinate. I was having selenium, and, you know, your copper, your boron, biotin, all those,” he says.

Owar, who welcomed his son in 2025, is one of a growing number of men increasingly taking their sperm health seriously and, in some cases, to extreme lengths.

Traditionally, women have been saddled with the fertility load. The stereotype goes that women have a biological clock ticking their fertile years away, while men are fertile forever.

Recently, these conversations have shifted. Men, including young men who aren’t in relationships or looking to have a child anytime soon, are increasingly concerned about their fertility and in particular, their sperm health.

“I’ve found that patients are getting younger and younger,” notes Dr Shannon Kim, a reproductive urologist from IVF Australia who specialises in male infertility. “Previously, men would come to see me well into their fertility journey, usually in their 30s. Now I’m seeing men in their early 20s who don’t even have a partner yet.”

The concern isn’t completely unfounded. Roughly one in six couples are affected by infertility and male factors contribute to up to 50 per cent of those cases. Last year, the first-ever national guidelines were introduced for the management of male fertility. Not to mention the widely cited, and hotly debated, 2017 meta-analysis that fuelled claims we’re facing a “spermageddon” with global sperm counts declining by over 50 per cent between 1973 and 2011. One of the co-authors of that study blamed endocrine-disrupting chemicals for part of the decline, which explains why some men, like Owar, stay wary of polyester.

“It’s an area of great controversy,” says Dr Luk Rombauts, group medical director at Monash IVF. “There’s certainly been a number of studies that have claimed that there has been a decline in a number of sperm parameters – sperm count and concentration being the main one – but the controversy is around whether the methods used back then are the same now.”

Rombauts concedes any decline might be plausible given “all the pollutants in our environment” and the uptick in IVF, which makes pregnancy possible for couples with infertility. “If you let infertile men reproduce, you could assume that over time, there’s gonna be an impact on the genetic selection.”

The term spermmaxxing has emerged as a way to describe the lengths various men are going to combat the issue and optimise their sperm. At one end, there are men like Owar, who maintain strict exercise and diet regimes alongside extensive supplement stacks, ice baths and underwear-free lifestyles. For many of these men, it’s about acknowledging it shouldn’t fall squarely on women to prepare for pregnancy.

“It’s a fancy name for just being healthy,” Owar says.

In one viral TikTok video, liked over 2.5 million times, a man proclaims, “men should have to spend nine months getting in the best physical shape of their life before having a baby”.

He rattles off a list of claims connecting the experience of pregnancy to sperm health, including that “morning sickness is tied to men because men build the placenta”. Though convincing, this lacks any evidence, and is likely based on misinformation about developmental genetics and how a placenta is formed. Nonetheless, the sentiment is resonating.

Tom Bull, 36, felt a similar obligation when he and his wife, Dominique, started talking about trying for a baby. “It’s a journey that you are on together, and it’s important for the woman to see the man stepping up to the plate long before the baby’s born,” he says.

Bull – who doesn’t identify as a spermmaxxer – visited a naturopath, started taking supplements and reassessed his exercise routine. An avid sauna-goer, Bull started taking an ice pack in with him, to place on his crotch and keep his testicles cooler.

“I’d seen viral videos on Instagram about icing your testicles in the sauna before you start trying to have kids as there’s research showing excessive heat can reduce sperm count and damage your sperm,” he says. “As soon as I saw that, it was just immediately a no-brainer.”

Rombauts confirms that prolonged excessive heat is damaging to sperm. We know when men develop a varicocele (varicose veins within the scrotum) this causes warm blood to pool around the testicles and this can lead to low sperm quality. “You don’t need to ice your testicles to improve your sperm quality, but yes, you do not want to sit in an environment where your testicles are constantly overheating,” he says.

When assessing fertility, doctors will look at three key sperm factors: count, motility (how fast, and in what direction the sperm moves) and morphology (their shape). All of these are important when assessing sperm health and fertility.

“The vast majority of men with poor sperm function, whether it’s one of those three or all the three together, in most cases, more than 70 per cent of the time, we don’t know what the reason is,” Rombauts says. “That is not because there isn’t a reason, it’s just that currently, with all the testing we can do, we’re not smart enough yet to understand.”

This is crucial context when considering the other, more extreme end of the spermmaxxing spectrum, where you have people like “longevity guru” Byran Johnson claiming he has sperm quality to “rival a 20-year-old” and those who are training to compete in the Sperm Racing World Cup.

Founded by tech entrepreneurs, the race is to be held in San Francisco next month and will see 128 men, each representing a different country, submit semen samples which will then “compete” in a microscopic race for a $10,000 prize. According to the event organisers, there have been over 10,000 applicants. “I don’t think it’s a good way of assessing what your fertility is like,” warns Rombauts, who also worries it’ll only serve to further stigmatise male infertility.

In the trailer for the Sperm Racing World Cup, with their chiselled jaws and bulging muscles, men look similar to the looksmaxxers who boast of their peptide routines and affinity for testosterone injections which, as poster boy for the movement Clavicular has acknowledged, does great harm to their fertility.

In fact, experts agree one of the most persistent myths is that injecting testosterone boosts sperm production. In reality, the opposite happens. When you inject testosterone, the brain detects high levels in the bloodstream and responds by signalling the testicles to shut down sperm production.

“These big, defined guys in the gym with massive arms and legs often have very small testicles and, frequently, no sperm,” says Kim, who has seen this pattern repeatedly in patients presenting with infertility. Some initially deny using testosterone, but their blood tests tell a different story. “Then they say, ‘I don’t want to stop my testosterone — can I still have sperm?’”

Aside from the obvious physical harm to be done, Dr Stephanie Westcott, an academic at Monash University also points out that the rhetoric employed by the Sperm Racing World Cup organisers – which frames sperm health as a competition – has links to the manosphere.

“With manosphere ideology, it is always a competition,” Westcott says. “Who can accumulate the most wealth and of course, the logical next part of that would also be whose body can produce superior sperm to prove that we can overcome this fertility crisis.”

Like most things, the experts stress maintaining a healthy sperm quality is about nailing the basics: don’t smoke or drink excessively, eat well (Rombauts recommends the Mediterranean diet) and exercise. And if you’re concerned, go to your doctor.

Bull and Dominique are now expecting their first child in October. He’s just as passionate about continuing to show up throughout pregnancy and beyond. ”I’ve been doing my best to make sure that I’m very present at things like ultrasounds, meeting with the midwife and the doula, to show my wife I’m gonna be there,” he says.

“We’re in this together, and I’m next to her every step of the way.”

Make the most of your health, relationships, fitness and nutrition with our Live Well

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.