Medical Express shares an edifying interview here with Wendy Kohrt, a professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Colorado and an expert on the effects of exercise on bones as we age.
So what are the benefits of exercise on new bone development? “We generated increases in the neighborhood of 2 percent,” Kohrt said.
That sounds … pathetic. But wait! Kohrt explained exercise elicits similar bone growth improvements as do medications, but the true difference lies not in the increase in bone density, but in bone strength.
With drugs, it’s a 1 to 1 ratio. If you increase density 2 percent, you increase strength 2 percent. With exercise, and this is being conservative, it’s a tenfold difference. Kohrt explained a 2 percent increase in bone mass can translate into a 20 percent increase in bone strength, and perhaps as much as 40 percent.
It’s important to note these are animal studies, because, well … they needed to break the bones to find out how strong they are. Not many people volunteer for those kinds of studies. “When you exercise, the stresses only occur in the regions of the skeleton that experience that stress,” Kohrt explained. Drugs aren’t targeted, but if there are specifically weak areas of your skeleton, you can give them extra attention via focused training. That’s good.
Read the full, fun interview here, and hat-tip to reader Tom Anthony for pointing it out.
Many thanks to “Mind The Science Gap,” a worthwhile blogging project by public health students at the University of Michigan, for this excellent post among many others. It argues that exercise is good for far more than weight loss, and avoiding osteoporosis — even if it seems to young women like a problem of the distant future — is one of those many reasons.
The post cites “A recent study in Sweden” that “confirms that high-impact exercise can improve bone density in younger women, giving them better protection against developing fractures as they age.”
Many types of exercise can help shed pounds, but only weight-bearing exercise—for instance, jogging as opposed to swimming—is recommended for increasing bone density. Weight-bearing exercise requires resistance from muscles and bones, which helps to make them stronger. While weight-bearing exercises have been known to be the key type for developing stronger bones, the newest research suggests there may be differences even between similar activities.
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