Good to the Bone

Whether you're 17 or 70, now is the time to protect yourself from osteoporosis. Weight-bearing yoga poses can help tone your bones.

By Linda Sparrowe

We do not have control over some of the risk factors for osteoporosis. If you are a thin, small-boned woman of Caucasian ancestry and both your grandmother and your mother have suffered stress fractures of the vertebrae in their later years, there's nothing you can do about those facts. What you can do, however, is create a lifestyle that promotes preventive care for your bones. These lifestyle choices, of course, should happen long before a woman enters perimenopause—preferably in her 20s and 30s—but it's never too late to start.

EXERCISE. Even the most conservative, HRT-prescribing doctor believes exercise increases bone mass in postmenopausal women. The key, according to Kendra Kaye Zuckerman, M.D., director of the osteoporosis program at Allegheny University Hospitals in Philadelphia, is that you must exercise consistently—at least 30 minutes a day, five days a week. Exercise works, according to Krisna Raman, M.D., author of A Matter of Health (East-West Books, 1998), because it stimulates bone remodeling and “improves the absorption of calcium from the intestine and promotes its deposition on the bones.”

In particular, weight-bearing exercises (walking, running, and other movements that exert pressure on the bones) are what stimulate the bones to retain calcium and produce more bone mass. By contrast, swimming, which can help joint pain and limited mobility, does nothing to increase bone density in the spine.

If a woman has already begun to lose bone mass—or is otherwise susceptible to vertebral stress fractures—running can put too much stress on the knees, ankles, and lumbar spine. The other problem with confining weight-bearing exercise to walking or running is that these activities only benefit the lower limbs and do nothing to strengthen the wrists, shoulders, upper back, or elbows/

One additional caveat about aerobic exercise: Be careful not to overdo it. Excessive exercise, and a corresponding drop in body fat, can actually increase your chances of osteoporosis, according to the National Osteoporosis Foundation. Young women whose weight has plummeted low enough to cause them to stop ovulating put themselves at risk for the disease.

YOGA. Yoga serves the body in several ways. Many health practitioners recommend yoga as a means of combating stress—which, they point out, can compromise the neuroendocrine and immune systems. Stress by itself does not cause problems. In fact, the human body has a very efficient, built-in mechanism for dealing with stress.

What scientists call "fight or flight" response is triggered when we become frightened, anxious, agitated, or threatened. If you've ever stepped off the curb and just barely missed being hit by a bus, for example, you know what this syndrome feels like: As your adrenaline soars, your blood pressure increases, your heart pounds wildly, you sweat like crazy, your mind becomes hyperalert, blood rushes to your large muscle groups (in the arms and legs), and your breathing becomes shallow and rapid. To bring as much power as possible to your sympathetic nervous system (which controls this response) so the body can react quickly and efficiently, the body diverts energy from your digestive, reproductive, and immune systems, slowing them down to a bare maintenance level.

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