FitOldDog Recommends Posture Training THEN Weight Training To Prevent Osteoporosis

Hi folks,

Osteoporosis comes with poor posture, but does poor posture play a causative role?

I have had a modicum of success in a number of challenging endeavors, such as photography and water polo in my teens, as a veterinarian and amateur flautist in my twenties, a neuropathologist in my thirties, a nose scientist in my forties, in applied mathematics in my fifties, and as a triathlete in my late fifties and sixties, but one of the most challenging things with which I have had to deal, in my late sixties, is my poor posture. I met Deb five years ago, and one of the first things she said, having had a background in dance, was, “Kevin, you really need to improve your posture.” I was surprised, as this was the first time anyone had suggested such a thing. Then Deb’s friend, Tara, said the same thing during our Pilates and Gyrotonic sessions, as did Karen, my Feldenkrais instructor. So I was sent to Rebecca for dance and, little did I know it, posture training. My posture was much like that of the lady in the middle of the adjacent drawing – head and shoulder blades displaced forward, shortened pectoral muscles, a rounding of the shoulders, rotation and imbalance of the pelvis with associated stresses on the legs and shortening of the body.

You daily activities will determine the stresses on your body and thus will sculpt your posture

It is easy to think of bones as being like dead sticks covered in meat and gristle, or as biological struts that just support the system. They don’t look very alive on your plate after a meal, and that is what most of us see when it comes to bones, most of the time. Nothing could be further from the truth. Living bones respond to load, and they do so very dynamically, and that load is constantly provided by gravitational forces acting on your skeleton as a result of the mass of your body parts pulling towards the center of the earth. These forces, combined with your genetic make up, nutrition and other factors, determine the internal structure of your bones, sculpting their connective tissue and it’s regional mineralization to optimize bone density for strength, flexibility, and resilience. This is one of the big challenges of any space program, how to maintain healthy bone density in the absence of normal gravitational forces.

How you stand or sit will determine the direction of forces through your bones, and will therefore determine their strength. One real key to preventing osteoporosis is good posture. This issue is nicely presented in Chez Ollie, as follows:

“Astronauts lose one to two percent of their bone density for every month they spend in space.”

“Mechanical stress going through the bones helps the boney matrix create bone to counteract those stresses, which is why “weight-bearing exercise” is strongly suggested to keep bones strong. Exercise aside, I have noticed that many people’s natural standing posture does not actually put much weight through the bones. The pelvis is often shifted forward, the ribcage is tilted back, and the head is forward. When I stand behind a person standing this way and push slowly but forcefully down both shoulders, the body tends to buckle sending the pelvis even further forward and the ribs further back. This suggests that the weight is going through the soft tissue rather than through the bones. Maybe the first step to maintaining and building bone mass is to make sure one is standing in a way that actually loads the bones!

The goal is to stack the bricks by trying to become as tall as possible, reaching the base of the skull up. Most people will need to bring their pelvis back to find their full height, which will in turn straighten ribcage. The pelvis should be directly over the legs in such a way that the thigh and buttock muscles are not contracting. You know you’ve got it right when there is no buckling in the body when someone pushes slowly but forcefully down on the shoulders. I find I can actually feel the pressure going through the bones when this is done to me.”

Do not underestimate the difficulty associated with fixing your posture once it goes awry. Lifting your heart or clavicles is a great place to start, and then I would go to a good dance teacher, as dance is very much about optimal posture. I would like to thank Deb for sending me to Rebecca, because it is making a world of difference to my triathlon training.

If you decide to undertake safe exercise for better health, including weight training to protect you from osteoporosis, FitOldDog recommends that you first take posture training, or you will be putting the load in all the wrong places.

-k @FitOldDog