Exercise is the essential tool for building and maintaining strong bones for life. The earlier you start in life strengthening your bones, the better you will be in the future. When it comes to strengthening your bones, however, all exercise is not created equal. The best type of exercise to stimulate your bone growth is weight-bearing exercise. This does not only mean walking or placing weight on your bones; it also is any activity that stresses your skeleton or the surrounding muscles that anchor to the bones. Bones respond to the stresses placed on them. When your bones sense stress or impulses from activity, it tends to become stronger and make more bone. This mechanism is very specific and only those bones that are stressed will get stronger. For instance, jogging can strengthen the bones in your feet, legs and even hips but will do nothing for the bones in your arm.
If your bones are not stimulated or used, they often weaken. It is said that the best exercise for building bones is weightlifting. A good weightlifting program that includes training your upper body, lower body, and core area will
strengthen bones all throughout your body. This is one reason why weight training is so important for females. Exercise that does not stress bones will not grow them.
Swimming, for example, is a wonderful exercise in so many ways; it is good for your heart and your lower back and makes you very fit but because you are practically weightless, you will probably not do much for your bones. It is never to late to start building your bones for the future, so get started today!
