Posted on July 08, 2014 by Jenny Cromack

Its easy to forget about things like bone health while you’re young, strong and get caught up focusing on belly fat. But this tunnel vision can have repercussions later in life if you’re not careful. I’m not allowed to name diets or companies that will absolutely potentially ruin your bone mineral density in later life, but to summarise any diet/nutrition plan or eating protocol that stops you eating a variety of proteins, fats and carbohydrates is probably a bad idea.

Here is why you should care about your bone health:

• Believe it or not your bones are actually living tissue, you’re actually likely to rebuild your skeleton around 12 times over a lifetime, your bones are constantly remodelling changing and adapting.  When you’re young you build new bone much faster than you lose it, peaking between 25 and 30, at which point it starts to go down hill. Beyond this age the rate of decline is faster than you can create it.
• If you’re female the rate of loss ramps up more immediately after menopause due to a massive drop in estrogen.
• Men’s bone loss is a bit more gradual, but as age takes hold testosterone and related androgen hormones decline and thus so does bone mineral density.
• And at the age of 65 it doesn’t matter if you’re male or female because bone loss will occur at roughly the same rate.
• Forearm fractures are the most common with individuals with osteoporosis followed by the hip and spine (that is very serious)
• Within 1 year of an osteoporotic fracture of the hip 20% of women and 30% of men in the USA will die

Okay so onto something a bit more brighter.

HOW DO YOU PROTECT YOUR BONE HEALTH? 

It’s really simple – you need to create a bone pension fund!

The best investment company you can use for this pension scheme is the resistance training company!

Research shows that irrespective of gender strength training can help you build the strongest bones possible. Particularly when the spine is loaded, exercises like squats and dead-lifts should form key exercises in all programs for health related training goals. Furthermore research has shown that bone mineral density is exercise specific, for example while a squat is great for the spinal column, hips and legs it does little for the forearms, this is where you need to involved heavy pressing exercises, such as bench press variations and military press variations. The earlier you can start this the better position you will be in later life. The best weight to use is somewhere between 75 and 95% of your 1 rep max.

Start early, reap the rewards later!