Ep 131 Lead with Your Bones part 2: How to Create Strong Bones

What does a decade working in an NHS hospital have to do with why you should be lifting weights?

In part two of the Lead With Your Bones series, Carly draws on ten years as a clinical dietitian to explain why the patients who came in with more muscle on their bodies consistently did better.

Because building bone and muscle isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about reserves. It’s about having a foundation to fall back on when life throws something at you, illness, surgery, grief, burnout, the relentlessness of midlife. Your bone bank and your muscle bank are the most practical investments in your future self you can make right now.

In this episode Carly explains exactly why mechanical load drives bone building, introduces the fascinating muscle-bone communication system including myokines, makes a clear case for why strength training is particularly important during and after menopause, and gives practical guidance on what actually counts, and how to begin.

Topics covered:

→ What Carly witnessed in a decade as an NHS dietitian and what it means for how you train now

→ Why mechanical load is the most important signal for bone building

→ The muscle-bone relationship, myokines, communication and why you can’t have one without the other

→ What counts as bone-loading exercise and what doesn’t

→ Why frequency matters more than intensity when you’re starting out

→ Why it is never too late to begin

Part 2 of the Lead With Your Bones series. Find Carly and book an Embodied Strength Profile Assessment at Still Space Hull  online and in person.

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.
👉 Click here to learn more and access today

🌟 Stay connected and inspired with daily wellness tips on Instagram @thestrongbonescoach.
🌟 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 well. Come back to Rooted in Presence. I'm Carly, your host and guide for this episode, which is number 131 and part two of the Lead with Your Bones miniseries. So last week we talked about what bone actually is living tissue. Constantly remodeling, wrapped in a remarkable membrane called the periosteum, and connected to the whole a fascial web of your body. If you haven't listened into the episode yet, I'd encourage you to go back and start there, but. If you are committed to listening to this episode, that's okay. You'll still be able to follow, but that first episode does set up for what's following today, and today we're getting a bit more practical. We're talking about movement, about strength, about load, about what you can actually do to support your bones and why it works. I always find the why is helpful to make sure I actually connect to what it is that I'm doing. I wanna start with somewhere that might surprise you. So not a gym, but a hospital. So for 10 years I worked as a dietician in a busy acute hospital. I saw a huge variety of health conditions across that decade, from routine operations to critical illness, from planned admissions to emergency situations. And over those 10 years, something became impossible to ignore. I noticed the patients who came in with more muscle on their bodies did better consistently, whether they were recovering from something that was like a planned surgery or fighting for their lives on the critical care unit with a ventilator breathing for them and tubes feeding them while they lay in a medically induced coma. The ones who had built stronger foundation before they came in had more to draw from when things got hard. And of course, we never really plan to become critically ill for the most part. So we don't always know what's gonna happen in life and hopefully this doesn't have to be part of our story, but it did give me a lot of insights because during a critical illness, muscle is lost rapidly. The body breaks it down for energy and for those building blocks it needs to keep fighting. So in this situation, bone density can also decline significantly during periods of complete immobility and acute illness. And the patients who are starting from a lower baseline, less muscle, less bone density, they had less resilience and they had a harder time recovering. The roadmap was longer, steeper, and of course, in some situations impossible to complete. And I watched this pattern play out again and again and it changed how I think about everything I do now. Because what I saw wasn't just about illness, it was about the power of building your reserves before you need them. Like your muscle bank, your bone bank, that physical foundation. That means when life throws something at you, illness, injury, surgery, grief, burnout, the sheer relentlessness of life, and especially midlife, it means you have something to fall back on. And that's what it's all about, not aesthetics or performance. It's your reserves, your resources, your resilience, the capacity to recover and move forward. So let's get talking about why movements and specifically strength training is so powerful for your bone health. So remember from last week, bone is a living tissue. It's constantly remodeling with osteoblasts building and osteoclasts removing bone. And one of the most important signals that osteoblasts respond to is mechanical load, which causes a stress on the bone. A good kind of stress by the way, and that's the kind that comes from your muscles pulling on it. That's what provides the impact from lifting that load, lifting that weight. So when you load a bone, it sends a signal and the osteoblasts receive it and they respond. They know that more bone cells are needed here, so they get to work. Over time, consistent loading leads to denser, stronger, more resilient bone tissue. Of course, the reverse is also true. If we remove the load through immobility illness or a very sedentary lifestyle, then the signal kind of goes quiet. The builders, the bone builders, they have less to respond to. Removers while they carry on at their usual pace. So eventually they outpace the the bone building cells, which again leads to bone loss over time. And it feels extra relevant right now too. I mean, this is what happens with astronauts. This is why they lose significant bone density and space. That's why they have to have such a rigorous exercise routine while they're up there. There's no gravity, there's no load, there's no nothing to signal the bone, and the muscle needs to stick around. And it's also our bed rest is associated with so much bone loss. And why getting people moving after illness or surgery is so important. The body needs to know it's still needed. So something that I find endlessly fascinating, and I don't think it gets talked about enough, but muscle and bone, they're not separate systems. They're actually in constant communication with each other. Muscles attached to bone by a tendons. When a muscle contracts, it pulls on the bone, and that mechanical tension is one of the key signals that drives the bone remodeling. So you literally can't build strong bones without strong muscles. They are dependent on each other, but it goes even deeper than that. We know that muscle tissue produces signaling molecules in and of itself. Sometimes we call them myokines. And they travel through the body and directly influence bone metabolism. So exercise doesn't just load the bone mechanically, it produces those chemical messages that support bone formation too. The two systems constantly talking to each other all the time. So this is why strength training is so particularly powerful for your bone health. More so than walking alone, but walking can count and we can come to that later. Resistance training are essentially strength training. It places that direct mechanical load on the bones stimulating the muscles to produce those signaling molecules. That creates the specific stress that tells those osteoblasts, there is demand here and we need to meet it. So for women in perimenopause and menopause, when the estrogens regulatory role in BO bone modeling is declining, this mechanical signal becomes even more important. You're essentially providing an alternative input to a system who's essentially your primary regulating factor has shifted. You are quite literally telling your bones that they still need to be here. So what does that actually look like?'cause you probably do hear those messages to lift heavy things and must all be lifting heavy. But what actually does count? So when we're talking about resistance training, essentially we're talking about lifting weights, but also using resistance bands and body weight exercises, things like squats, lunges, press-ups. These are all great gold standard exercises for bone loading. If you're already doing some of this, it's genuinely one of the most powerful investments you can make in your future health. Of course, I'm not just saying that as a fitness professional trying to sell you a gym membership, I can't do that, but as someone who's spent a decade watching what happens to bodies that didn't receive this foundation when they needed it the most, it's not like we can go back and redo. So starting where you are is a really good idea. But also impact makes a difference too. Walking, jogging, dancing, stair climbing, anything that puts your body weight through your skeleton sends a loading signal. On the other hand, we have our low impact activities, things like swimming and cycling. They are really great for cardiovascular health and joint comfort, but they don't load your bones in the same way. So if swimming is your main activity, brilliant, keep going with that. But I'd also invite you to think about what else you could do to load the bones alongside that, perhaps lifting some weights, perhaps some variations on press up, things like that. And again, if you're not sure, do reach out. I have plenty I can help you with. But also frequency matters more so than intensity at the start. So two sessions a week of resistance training done consistently can do a lot more for your bones than one really intensive session that you dread and end up putting off and sometimes skipping. Although new studies have come out to say a full body resistance training session once a week does something rather than nothing. The key here is, is making sure you can recover.'cause we're not just here to use exercise as punishment. It's here to support you. So we don't really want you to be dreading it. So even if it is once a week for you, that's great. Make it something that offers you some challenge, but still allows you to recover and do the rest of your life too.'cause essentially that's why we're doing all of this so we can live our lives. Overall, what we're trying to do here is we're building habits and a signal, and the body responds to repetition. But what's really important here? I want to remind you of is that it's never too late to start because yes, there is evidence that 80% of our bone mass is formed by age 18, and our peak bone mineral density is reached by around 35 in midlife ish, but bone responds to load at any age. There's women in the seventies and eighties have maintained their bone density through strength training. At this point, maintaining is winning. Your body is more responsive than most of us have been led to believe, especially if you're new to strength training. And the client that I mentioned last week, that one that went from having spinal fractures and walking on two sticks to walking freely, she's proof of that. She halted further bone loss from osteoporosis without any medication. So the skeleton is listening and it will respond to the right signals. So, that gets to be quite exciting. So as we draw to a close, I want to end today with something that often gets left out of the strength training conversation, and that's recovery because building bone and muscle doesn't happen during the workout. It happens afterwards, during rest, during sleep, during the quiet time when your body integrates the signals it's received and. Does the rebuilding work and you can't out-train a lack of recovery. And the same is true for your bones. And this is especially important, especially for those of you who are navigating periods of exhaustion, burnouts, illness, or even low energy. Because a question like asked is, if I can't train at my usual level, am I losing ground? Am I losing bone? Yeah, that's a super important question. So let me give it an answer properly, and that's what we're gonna do next week. In part three of the series, we're gonna talk about exactly that, the whole body picture, nutrition, stress, sleep, and breath, and what it means to care for your bones when life is hard and your capacity is reduced. But the answer is more hopeful than what you might think. So. That brings us to the end of part two of Lead With Your Bones, with the invitation to move with intention. Build your reserves before you need them, and know that every time you pick up a weight, go for a walk or climb a flight of stairs. You are sending your skeleton a signal. It hears you and it will respond. And if you're wondering where to start with strength training or if you've even been doing it a while and want to make sure you're doing all the things that support your bones in a more specific way, I do offer my embodied strength profile assessment, which gives us a really clear picture of where you are now and what your bones and body need most. That's available both in person at Still Space Hall and also online. So come and find me@stillspacehall.com if you would like to know more. So part three is next week. Until then, may you meet yourself with Compassion Walk With Presence. And remember, you already have everything you need.