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Weight Bearing Exercise and why it is important for good health & great fitness

osteoporosis

For both men & women, modern living, poor diets, lack of exercise and stress all contribute to a range of health issues.

Osteoporosis is becoming more common amongst men and has always been an issue for women, especially when going through any hormonal changes.

However, its not all bad news. Exercise in many forms can help with osteoporosis – it won’t reverse the condition but it can control it and it can stall the spread.

 

What are the best exercises? What does weight bearing exercise mean?

 

  • Weight bearing exercise includes any exercise where you bear the weight of your body or indeed where you lift weights, so….
  • Weight lifting, resistance training is top of the list. Lifting weights stimulates the skeleton to produce new bone cells and discard older weaker bone cells (known in science as osteoblasts and osteoclasts!)
  • Hour of Power – lifting lighter weights for long reps is a great way to strengthen bones and tick off a great cardio workout too
  • Running is great for putting force through the legs and hips
  • Good old fashioned bodyweight exercises such as press ups, burpees, squat thrusts – basically all the moves you perform in Metafit, Insanity or any other circuits style conditioning class
  • We can add Yoga & Tai-Chi to the list too!

 

Watch this wee video for a short educational view of how you build bones

http://random42.com/bone-biology-osteoblasts-and-osteoclasts-animation

 

Conrad Rafique, Fitness Coach & mPT  November 2015

 

Conquer Your Personal Fitness Mountain

Coming soon….. my booklet on how to take command of your health, what you need to commit in order to develop life-long fitness and why your brain & body need certain nutritional elements to flourish.  I will add this as a downloadable file soon.

Running Development

Many of my clients are runners – aspiring marathoners to sub-40 minute 10k people…. What do they have in common?

 

The one thing they have in common is a tendency to not warm up thoroughly enough thus picking up lower leg injuries.  Of course, its not just about a lack of warm-up.  It goes much deeper into their running technique and their individual bio-mechanics.

Man was born to run – as I have stated before – we evolved with an innate ability to run, either to hunt or to evade danger – the classic ‘Fight or Flight” (I know in some cases the brain just Freezes….we’ll set that aside for now)

However, the majority of runners pounding the streets of Great Britain today are doing so in well cushioned footwear and with a stride that doesn’t really pay true homage to our great evolution as runners over the last 200,000 years.  Its for this reason that I am currently writing a new Running Development programme to help both existing and new clients with running technique and with an objective of making running:

  1. PAIN-FREE
  2. INJURY-FREE
  3. EFFICIENT, ECONOMIC and therefore…….
  4. FASTER

Watch this space its coming soon, drills, videos, articles, maybe a forum, definitely some live events and sessions using the magnificent Bebington Oval – Mid-March launch date

YOURS IN Running – Conrad,