Get Strong Bones
Do you ever think about your bones, you know, your actual skeleton, your skelly bones? You have an amazing structure made up of 206 bones and every bone is living tissue. These living tissues need to be kept strong and you can do this using diet and exercise. As you get older, bone health is crucial to quality of life.
What is Bone?
Let’s have a look at Wikipedia for a definition:
A bone is a rigid organ that constitutes part of the skeleton in most vertebrate animals. Bones protect the various other organs of the body, produce red and white blood cells, store minerals, provide structure and support for the body, and enable mobility.
Wikipedia
From the definition above you start to realise the number of jobs your lovely bones do for you. All they ask in return is not to get broken (!) and please feed and nurture me.
Which Exercises Help with Bone Health
Everyone should be aware that as you age your bones can get less strong, sometimes this is expressed as getting more brittle. Brittle bone disease is a different level of problem, and you shouldn’t confuse the two things.
Most normally aging people can maintain or even improve bone health by getting some weight bearing exercise into their everyday life.
- WALK – walking is a great activity for bones and for almost everything else. Get some ambulation into the day!
- LIFTING WEIGHT – this is definitely a good thing for overall strength as well as improving bone health. Your bones will love you if your muscles are up to the job of supporting them.
- BALANCE – this can be done using little tricks like standing on one leg when brushing your teeth and there as also great tools like Swiss balls to help you improve balance
- FLEXIBILITY – Another element of your overall fitness that if improved will help with bone health. If your joints are in good shape and their surrounding tendon and muscles this will allow you better exercise opportunity and more able to cope with injury.
Eating For Bone Health
Nutrition is also important and bones need calcium, vitamin D and protein. The calcium is helping keep teeth and bones healthy and the vitamin D helps the body absorb calcium. Clever eh? Going outside in the sun (don’t even say it!) will help the body generate vitamin D. You can take supplement for this if necessary.
The protein will help with your muscle fitness, after all without muscle your bones ain’t doing much by themselves.
Here are RISE we are super aware of all these health benefits, and we would love to see you at a session. Have a look to see if we have a location near you or coming soon.
Photo by Nino Liverani on Unsplash
#outdoorfitness #strongbones #exerciseforstrongbones
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