Text provided by Dr. Diana Bitner, true. Women's Health:
Takeaway Tip: No matter your activity goals, stay strong and stretch. It will pay dividends your whole life.
Get a clear picture of how you want to feel by Memorial Day. Flexible? Mobile? Strong? You can be active and reduce your chances of injury by doing 3 things: stretching daily, building muscle mass, and supporting your bone health.
How does stretching help?
This is controversial and has been shown to be most effective for sports like soccer and tennis. When your muscles, ligaments, tendons and fascia are tight, your movement is limited and might not release in the correct direction. That can lead to a sprain or torn ligament, i.e. the knee ACL for example. Specific activities, like muscle warm-ups, have also been shown to be helpful. It gets blood flow to the muscles, heats up the muscles to lower the activation energy for metabolic processes, and makes the muscle less stiff and more able to move with direction change.
Muscle mass helps reduce injury by stabilizing the joints and reducing the risk of falling.
Muscle training increases muscle strength and strength of the tendon to bone connection, ligaments connecting joints, and the connective tissue in the muscle. Muscle mass also increases bone mass and therefore reduces the risk of fracture if a fall is to happen. No matter your activity level, having good muscle mass is critical to reducing your risk of injury. This could be gardening and lifting bags of dirt and pots, jogging or pickle ball, or extreme snow or water skiing. As you age, muscle mass means independence and being able to lift your groceries, a suitcase, or move furniture.
Bone health can be difficult to maintain; we often take it for granted.
It is not obvious that bone health is poor until you have a fall and break something, even when there is not much force. Females reach their peak bone mass around age 32. Once your peak is reached, it will start to fall unless it is maintained with activity, Vitamin D to absorb calcium from your gut, and calcium in your food or a supplement. The activity that matters is that which stresses the bone i.e. jumping, walking, or building muscle. Think of muscle pulling on the bone sending a message: stay strong!
Helpful workouts:
- Body weight resistance training: squats, lunges, sit-ups, push-ups, burpees, etc.
- Strength training at a gym, preferrable at first with a strength trainer who can personalize a plan
- Dr. Bitner's favorite: the Peloton app - has all options!
- · Swimming - even pushes off the wall helps bone health
- Pilates
- Yoga
- Boxing
- Hiking steep hills
- Barre
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