Let’s clear up this confusion even further, osteoporosis warrants an extensive work-up looking for the cause of excess bone loss. Someone who is at the peak of their bone building and strength. It’s a description of “low bone mass” and all it is doing is stating an observation that your bone mass is lower than that of someone who is in their late twenties. Osteopenia, on the other hand, is not a diagnosis. You are also more likely to get it if you are a woman. Some people are genetically prone to it having a family history. This condition occurs when your body gets rid of more bone than it is creating. The word osteoporosis actually means “porous bones” since the bones look like Swiss cheese under closer inspection and lose their normal, healthy spongy appearance. When you have been diagnosed with osteoporosis, it means you have an actual disease or disorder that can be seen under the microscope. It is indicative of long term imbalances within the body’s systems that lead to a bone weakening disease process. Osteoporosis is not and I repeat not a normal response to aging.
That is “osteoporosis and osteopenia.” Simply put, osteoporosis suggests a disease process whereas osteopenia is a description of lowered bone density scores. With that, there are two terms related to your bone health that I feel need to be clarified. Now with the focus on bone health, isometric exercise is again mentioned as a means to improve the status of your skeletal system and its bones. Now fitness experts and the most prestigious health and fitness journals in the world are publishing studies that endorse isometric exercise as an exceptional route to improving muscular strength, bone health, cardiovascular function, and athletic performance with minimal stress to joints, tendons, and the body’s other supporting structures. The benefits and results of an isometric exercise program have always been exceptional in increasing the tension of a muscle, but with advent of technology affecting the fitness and exercise world over the past forty years, isometric exercise has been virtually forgotten. Both forms of exercise increase the tension of a muscle, but isotonic exercise also affects the muscle’s length.
#ISOMETRIC EXERCISES OSTEOPOROSIS FREE#
When doing workouts at the gym with free weights or machines, you are performing isotonic exercises. It is a static exercise where the muscle is contracted in a fixed position against an immovable object. Isometric exercise is a contraction of a muscle without any visible movement occurring. Isometric exercise has been around for a long time in both the fitness and rehabilitation world, but is most definitely having a rebirth! After years of limited results and cumulative injury with dynamic, movement based exercise, health and fitness professionals along with a host of academic and medical journals are looking at isometric exercise as not only the safest, but most effective exercise available.