Ladies–if you are over the age of 50, the thought of developing osteoporosis has likely crossed your mind at some point. You may have friends who developed osteoporosis, or perhaps somebody in your family has been diagnosed with osteopenia.
Strengthening bones and keeping bones strong is a big concern for many women, so if you find this to be true for you, I want you to know you are not alone. I also want you to know that there is something you can do about it!
Unfortunately, much of the advice around osteoporosis is actually leading ladies in the wrong direction with their lifestyle and the strength of their bones.
At the end of the day, there is one thing that tells your bones they need to start getting stronger and rebuilding, and that is force.
Force is the number one factor that will tell your bones to get stronger. With it, your bones will become more dense and durable. Without it, your bones will become weaker and more fragile.
The problem I see is that many ladies start taking force out of their life as they get older. This usually happens for two reasons.
First, there is a fear of getting hurt from doing high-force activities.
Second, there is a feeling of not needing to do high-force activities yourself anymore and instead getting help for it. For example, you may hire somebody to do your yard work when you used to do it all yourself.
Another example for women in particular is for a period of our life we are carrying babies and kids all around the house and throughout our day. We carry them up stairs. We pick them up to bring them to the table. We play with them on the ground. Then, our babies grow up and we don’t do those things anymore. By the time grandkids come around, many ladies feel like they have gotten too old to do those things, so they don’t.
All of these are examples of taking force out of your life.
The goal with your workouts needs to be to put force back into your life in a controlled way, and then as your bones strengthen you can keep putting force into your life in other ways.
So how do you do this?
There are two main ways I recommend this being done.
The first is what I call high-impact training. I know you’ve heard that you need to do lower impact training in order to keep your joints healthy, but the truth is you actually need to do high-impact training in a controlled way both for the health of your bones and your joints.
The second is heavy resistance training. Many women do strengthening exercises, but they don’t do them heavy enough. If the force isn’t high enough, it won’t change your bones in the right ways. Again, this needs to be controlled so you stay safe while you do it, but going light is not the answer when it comes to your strength training if you want to strengthen your bones and fight osteoporosis.
So how do you do the high impact training and the heavy strength training without hurting yourself? That’s exactly what I will be covering the next post in this series. Stay tuned for that, and in the meantime be sure to join my OsteoStrength For Her newsletter! Every week I send out an email newsletter giving you tips and strategies about how to strengthen your bones in a safe way with your workouts.
You can get signed up for free by entering your name and email address here.
In strength and health,
Julie
