Ep 130 Lead With Your Bones Part One: Your Bones Are Alive

When you picture your bones, what do you see? Most of us imagine something rigid and inert, a coat hanger, a Halloween skeleton. Something that just hangs there in the dark while the rest of us gets on with living.

But that picture is wrong. 

And in this episode,the first of a three-part series called Lead With Your Bones, Carly is here to change it.

In this episode Carly explains the science of living bone in plain, language, including why oestrogen matters so much to bone health, what changes during perimenopause and menopause, and why one in two women over fifty in the UK will be affected by osteoporosis. 

She also shares a brief story of a client who went from spinal fractures and walking with two sticks to living freely and a beautiful, mythic moment drawn from Clarissa Pinkola Estés that captures the deeper philosophy of this work.

This is episode one of three. Come back next week for part two Lead With Your Bones — where we get practical about movement, strength and load.

Topics covered:

→ Why bones are living tissue, not inert scaffolding

→ Your bone’s maintenance crew explained simply

→ How oestrogen regulates bone remodelling and what changes at menopause

→ Emerging ideas around bones and your fascia

Thanks for listening to Rooted In Presence

If you’d like to get in touch with a question about today’s episode or find out how I can support you with coaching, here’s how to reach me:
📧 Email: carlykillenpt@gmail.com
📱 Instagram: @thestrongbonescoach

Do you crave unshakable confidence in your strength from midlife and beyond? Would you love to achieve your goals without sacrificing family time or self-care?

Ready to take your strength to the next level? Start building a stronger body and healthier bones with my Strong Bones Starter Kit; your step-by-step guide to safe and effective strength training at home.
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🌟 For tailored advice or personal queries, email me at carlykillenpt@gmail.com

Thank you for being here, and I look forward to supporting you on your journey to strength, health, and confidence! 💪🦴✨

Transcript

0:46

Hello and welcome to Rooted in Presence. I'm Carly, your podcast host and midlife coach, and here we are at episode 130 and today I'm returning to something I haven't talked about for quite a while. And something in many ways kind of started all of this. Some of you who've been here a while will know that this podcast didn't always go by this name rooted in presence. It started out as the Strong Bones Coach Podcast. Bones were the foundation of all of this. The whole reason I began speaking into a microphone at all. And over time the conversations broadened. Uh, menopause was always along for the ride, but we started to. Lean into breath work into identity and presence and the whole beautiful, complicated experience of being a human in midlife. And of course, I don't regret that for one second, that's exactly where it needed to go, but the bones never stopped being the foundation. And I think it's time to. Do a little pass around in that wonderful spiral of learning that I often talk about. So today I'm starting a short series, three episodes, one theme, and the theme is around our bones. Now, I know you might be thinking, gosh, Carly, that's a lot of episodes, just about bones. Perhaps not that exciting, but stay with me because I think by the end of the episode you might find yourself thinking about your skeleton in a bit of a different way. I genuinely hope so anyway, because the way most of us have been taught to think about our bones, if we've thought about'em at all, it's not only incomplete, it's possibly doing them a disservice. So over these three episodes, we're going to look at bones from three angles. Today we're gonna look at what your bones actually are and why that answer might surprise you. Next week we're gonna look at how to build and support them through movement and strength, and the week after the whole body picture, nutrition, stress, breath, circulation. The emotional landscape that can either nourish or deplete our skeleton over time. I've called this series Lead With Your Bones, inspired by a song that I really enjoy because I think that when we truly understand what our bones are capable of and what they're asking of us, something shifts. We stop thinking about our skeleton as something to be worried about, and perhaps we can start thinking about it as something to be in relationship with. So let's get started and let's start perhaps with a reframe. Let me ask you something here. When you picked your bones, what do you actually see? I'm gonna hazard a guess since you can't talk back to me instantly, but from what I. I've come across in conversation. Most people picture something almost like a coat hanger or one of those plastic skeletons that goes up in the window at Halloween or perhaps at the back of a dusty cupboard in a science lab or something. Something rigid in a, a fixed white structure that just holds everything up. The scaffolding inside a building, sort of waiting in the in the dark while the rest of you gets on living. And I understand why we think that way. It's essentially what we were shown at school. A picture of a skeleton named parts. That's it. But I believe the picture leaves something out here. Your bones are really living tissue right now. As you're listening to this, your skeleton is doing something. It's breathing in its own way. It's responding, it's making decisions. It's breaking down and rebuilding itself in a constant, dynamic cycle that never stops. Well, not until you do anyway. So the bones are not simply a coat hanger. They truly are an organ, and unlike every other organ in your body, how you treat them matters. What you feed them matters. How you move or don't move matters and the stress you carry, the breath you take, the load you put through your body. All of it is information that your bones are receiving and responding to all of the time. So let me explain a little of what's going on inside a bone. Perhaps it'll give you a different level of appreciation. So your bones are not just one solid structure. They're actually made up of several layers. We have the outer shell, we call that cortical bone, which is dense and strong, and it gives the bone a bit of a structure. And then inside that, particularly in larger bones. We have this trabecular bone, sometimes called spongy bone, which might sound a bit icky or alarming, but it's actually an incredibly clever lattice structure, very much like scaffolding, inside scaffolding, and it's really strong. It's lightweight and specifically designed to absorb and distribute force. So it's really clever. And then running through all of this, living within the bone itself are cells, different types of cells, two cells in particular that I'd like you to know about because they're essentially a bones maintenance crew. The first of these are osteoblast. They are the builders constantly laying down new bone tissue, responding to load and stress and movement, essentially saying, right, we need more here. This is where we'll build it. The second are osteoclasts. These are the removers. They break down old damaged bone tissue then the, the builders, the osteoblast, can replace it with something fresh and strong and That process, the breaking and building and building and breaking. It's called bone remodeling and it happens continuously throughout your entire life. Your skeleton today is not the skeleton you had 10 years ago. That material has been replaced layer by layer over and over again. Essentially that life, death, life cycle is playing out constantly in our bones and in a healthy system. These two cells, these crews, they work in balance. The builders keep pace with the removers and the results is a skeleton that stays strong and responsive. But of course, especially if you are a woman listening to this, menopause becomes a factor because one of the things estrogen does among many of its other jobs, is actually regulates that bone remodeling balance. It essentially keeps the osteoclast in check. It says, okay, let's not remove too much and let's make sure the rebuilding actually happens. So when estrogen levels drop during perimenopause and menopause, The regulatory signal weakens. The removers start to outpace the builders. And over time, if nothing is done to support that system, bone density can decrease. And this is why one in two women over 50 in the UK will be affected by osteoporosis, not because they've done anything wrong. Because nobody told them this is happening or what they could do about it. Next, there's another part of the bone, which is a little bit more newly explored and newly discovered, and I love finding out new things. Curiosity runs through me like a stick of rock, I think I might say. So let me briefly introduce two things that I think are gonna become a much bigger part of how we understand the body over the coming years. The first is the periosteum. The second is fascia and the relationship between them is really beautiful. So the periosteum is that membrane that wraps around the outside of your bones. Almost every bone in your body has this, and it's not just a wrapper, it's a living active layer with its own blood vessel, its own nerve supply, and its own population of those osteoblast cells. Like I talked about earlier, sitting ready to build and repair, it has those two layers, that outer fibrous layer that gives structural strength and connects to tendons and ligaments. And then we have that inner cambian layer that sits right against the bone and it houses the stem cells responsible for bone growth and healing. So one thing really worth knowing about the periosteum is that it's the most pain sensitive part of your bone, more sensitive than the bone tissue itself, which is why a fracture hurts so acutely. And why a knock on the shin feels so sharp. The periosteum is paying attention. Is your bones first line of feeling? Yeah. When we say I can feel it in my bones, we're not kidding. Now. Fascia is another tissue. It's a layer of connected tissue that surrounds and weaves through everything else in your body, every muscle, every organ, all those spaces in between, all connected by this continuous web, almost like that inner lining of a wetsuit running through your entire body, uh, without interruption. And very much like the periosteum. Fascia is also not just passive packaging, it's a communication system. It responds to movement, tension, stress, hydration. It carries sensation, it connects structures we once thought of as entirely separate. So what's the difference between these two structures then Periosteum and fascia? Well, we can think of it a bit like this. We have the fascia is the body's whole connective web. Periosteum is where that web meets bone. It's like a threshold between your skeleton and everything else. The tendons, the ligaments, the fascial layers of your muscles, they all attach to the outer periosteum before connecting into the bone itself. So they're literally continuous with each other, like a doorway between rooms, like a threshold, like I say. So not this hard border, not this. Hard line, but that gradual transition from one living tissue to another. And this is how they can communicate both ways. So the science around this is still emerging and perhaps still being debated as well, which I love'cause this is how we find new things. And what we're discussing really is that the bone itself might be understood as ossified fascia. How ossified is where it's turned into bone. And another thought is that the skeleton isn't separate from the fascial system at all, but the same continuous connected tissue just mineralize a little bit more into structure. So if that idea lands for you the way it did for me, just holding your mind, perhaps your bones are not a separate, solid thing inside a soft body. They're part of one continuous living, communicating whole. The skeleton does not exist in isolation. It exists within a system that is listening and responding and adapting to how you live. So let me share with you something a, a little briefly. About of course, keeping any client details confidential, but it does sit in the heart of the work that I do. Now, I've worked with a lot of women that have osteoporosis, but one in particular always pops to mind when I talk about bones. She had many spinal fractures. She had really severe osteoporosis and her frailty score, that clinical measure of how vulnerable someone is to Further injury was really high. She was walking on two sticks and understandably she was frightened, frightened of falling, frightened of fracturing again, frightened into what her future would look like. She'd stopped doing many of her activities and started to become quite isolated as well. But now she's walking freely living her life with purpose and confidence, going places, doing things. The two sticks are gone. And I'm not sharing that. Just to suggest that strength training is a miracle cure. It isn't, and bone health is complex and individual and always worth discussing with your medical team. But I am sharing this because it is a reminder of what's possible when we understand that the body does respond, that bone is a living tissue and that it can change. And of course, I'm not just always about the practical. As much as I like to bring the practical and the real life into things, I like to have some imagination into the work I do as well. So I'd also like to share with you something that's developed a little more in my mind more recently. And it popped up during an embodiment practice, a moment of deep stillness where I was guided to breathe into the different layers of my body, into the muscle, the fascia, and finally into the bones, the structure underneath everything else. And in that stillness, something settled and that sense of being held in my own body in a way I don't always remember to notice, but that sense of the architecture inside me. Not just something to worry about, to manage, but that real sense of something ancient and strong and fundamentally mine. And it reminded me of the work of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, one of my favorite authors, specifically the story of La Loba, the Wolf woman. And this is his tale of the old woman who wanders the desert, collecting the bones of wolves. And when she gathered them all, she sings over them. As she sings, the bones begin to knit together and flesh returns, and eventually a wolf leaps up and runs. And at the end and at the edge of the desert, it transforms into a woman laughing and running free. Now, Estee writes about the story as a metaphor for their deep feminine work Of recollection and reclamation of gathering the scattered parts of yourself and singing them back to life. And I've been thinking about that a lot in relation to the work that I do, because so much of what I do with the women I work with is exactly that. The practical side. Yes, of course I'm nowhere near as poetic as my favorite author, but the strength training, the nutrition, the breath work, that's all part of it. Underneath it all is an invitation to remember that you are already whole, that all parts of you are there. Sometimes you just need to be gathered up and sung back together and given permission to run. So that's where we begin. Your bones are alive, they're listening, and they're remodeling layer by layer in response to how you move and eat and breathe and live. And they are part of a connected, intelligent, responsive system that is far more extraordinary than any Halloween skeleton gives them credit for. So next week in part two, we're going to get more practical. We're going to talk about movement, strength, and load. And while lifting weights is one of the most powerful things in midlife that a woman can do for her bones. I will also be bringing in some of what I saw during my decade of working in the MHS because some of those observations changed how I think about what can be good for the body. And if you'd like to try something before then a small invitation, and we find a quiet moment this week, sit still, take a breath. And see if you can feel into your own structure, the weight of your bones in the chair, the length of your spine, the breadth of your rib cage as it rises and falls. And you don't have to do anything with that, but maybe just take some time to notice and maybe say hello. Your bones have been holding you up your whole life. They might appreciate a little bit of acknowledgement. So that's it for me this week. So until next time. May you meet yourself with compassion, walk with Presence, and remember you already have everything you need.