Bone is built by load

For thirty years, women with thinning bones were told to walk, do gentle yoga, and above all not lift anything heavy. Belinda Beck, an exercise scientist at Griffith University in Australia, thought that was backwards. Bone is built by load. In 2018 she published the trial that proved it.

It was called LIFTMOR. A hundred and one women past menopause with low bone density. Half of them did thirty minutes of heavy deadlifts, squats, overhead presses and jumps twice a week for eight months, under supervision. The other half did the gentle program everyone had been prescribing. The lifting group gained bone in the spine and hip. The gentle group lost it. Nobody got hurt. The women were an average of sixty-five years old.

That result has since been repeated in men and in younger women. It overturned a rule about what a body can do at sixty, and that is why it's in the month called You. Most of what you believe about your body's limits was handed to you. Some of it is wrong in your favor.

Here's how bone works. It responds to force, and most of all to forces it doesn't expect: heavy, fast, in new directions. Walking is wonderful for the heart and does almost nothing for the spine, because your skeleton has felt walking every day since you were one. The program itself comes later in the year, with a coach and a bar. The key for this month is the number.

Bone density is measured by a DEXA scan, ten minutes, and most women aren't offered one until sixty-five and most men never. If you've had one, the T-score is your number. If you haven't, whether you should is a doctor's call based on age, family and history. What you can do today, with a wall and a pencil, is check your height against the height on your license. Bone that's going quietly takes an inch first.