Keeping hold of your bones

I think this is the last of the new things I learned from the SMA conference.

The guys up at Edith Cowan University are the world experts in exercise for prostate cancer, really focusing on men who have undergone androgen deprivation therapy for their treatment (i.e. have been brought to castrate levels for testosterone). This results in a dramatic decrease in bone mineral density (BMD), of 3.5 t-scores. To give context, anything beyond -2.5 t-scores = osteoporosis, so these guys are becoming extremely brittle from the treatment.

Traditionally, for osteoporosis, and especially osteopenia, we would prescribe doing heavy weights like barbell squats to maintain or slightly improve BMD. The first amazing thing is that their current work is showing that in these men, the traditional weight lifting is not really helping  that much: that group still dropped more than -3 t-scores, and were no different than the controls. What they did find that helped was impact training. The group who did impact training had a slight increase in BMD.

What is impact training? Basically jumping. The specific exercises he used as examples were jump rope, jumping over small hurdles, and dropping off a box and landing. The shock waves from these landings stimulate bone growth. This is the traditional prescription for helping bone growth in children, but has long been held as too hard and risky for older adults without substantial benefit. This study has so far proven that fear bogus, and shows that impact training should and can be continued throughout the entire life span.

A caveat that he made: if the person already has osteoporosis and suffered fractures, impact training then definitely does become too risky. But as long as they haven't broken anything yet, it might be good to do. Other things to consider: if a person has osteoarthritis in their knees, it could be really uncomfortable, and depending on the severity, could be risky as well.