Strong bones – how does physical activity affect our skeletal system?

Regular physical activity reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease (including heart attack, hypertension and stroke) and helps fight excess weight. This fact is widely known.

However, far fewer people realize that physical activity is also very important in building and maintaining healthy, strong bones.

Weightlifting and strength training

Strength training can increase bone mineral density and reduce inflammation.

Research has shown that both weightlifting and any strength training helps strengthen bones and prevent damage to their normal structure.

For example, a study of bone density in children with type 1 diabetes found that participating in weight-bearing physical activity during periods of peak bone growth improved bone density. Another similar study confirmed these results.

Benefits of strength training:

• increased bone mineral density
• increased bone size
• reduction of inflammation
• protection against bone loss
• increase in muscle mass

Patterns of bone formation

The principles of bone tissue formation were formed by P.F. Lesgaft - the founder of functional anatomy, which are as follows:

1. Bone tissue is formed in places of maximum tension or compression.
2. The degree of bone development depends on the activity of the muscles associated with it. Its external shape changes under the influence of pressure or stretching, that is, development is more intense where there is higher motor activity. In places where muscles are attached to the bone, an outgrowth is formed with the help of tendons, and when woven into the periosteum in a wide layer, a depression is formed.
3. The tubular and arched structure of the bone determines its strength and low weight with the least amount of bone material required.
4. The external shape of bones is formed depending on the pressure exerted on it. Their shape and position are influenced by internal organs, and even vessels, where grooves form on the bones.

Eat more vegetables

Vegetables are low in calories and provide the body with vitamins, minerals and fiber. One study found that vitamin C helps protect bones from damage.

Eating yellow and green vegetables is beneficial for most people. In children, these vegetables promote the growth of all parts of the skeleton, and in adults they help maintain bone density and strength. One study found that children who ate lots of green and yellow vegetables and little fried foods had increases in healthy fat and bone density.

In another study, postmenopausal participants who ate 9 servings of kale, broccoli and other vegetables daily for 3 months experienced decreased bone turnover and calcium loss. Researchers attribute these results to the increased polyphenol and potassium content of vegetables.

Rounding the hips

To round and tighten your hips and become a more attractive woman, you need to systematically perform strength exercises. They need to be performed four times every seven days.

The following exercises will tell you how to make your hips round:

1. Standing straight, place your feet shoulder-width apart. Place your arms along your body. Exhaling, shift your whole body onto your right leg and lunge to the side. Place your palms on your right thigh. Inhaling, return to the starting position. Then, as you exhale, lunge to the left. The exercise must be repeated twenty times for each leg;
2. Connect your legs and place your palms on your belt. As you exhale, lunge forward with your right leg. Stay in this position for about a minute. Inhaling, return to the starting position. Do the same for the left leg. You need to repeat three more times;
3. Place your feet shoulder-width apart, palms back on your hips. As you exhale, squat down, move your tailbone back, and place your hands in front of you. Stay in this position for no more than ten seconds. Your thighs should be parallel to the floor during a squat. Inhaling, take the starting pose. You need to perform fifteen such squats;
4. Kneel down and place your palms on the floor under your shoulders. Raise your right leg parallel to the floor. In this case, you need to pull the toe towards you. Stay in this position for sixty seconds. After this, rock up and down for a minute. As you exhale, replace your right leg with your left. And do the exercise one more time in the same way;
5. Sit on a covered mat and straighten your legs. Place your hands crosswise on your chest. Step forward with your buttocks at a distance of two meters. Having reached the finish line, use your buttocks to move backwards, backwards, like a caterpillar.

Thanks to such simple daily workouts, you can achieve beautiful rounded shapes in the hips and buttocks in a short time. It is important to perform all exercises smoothly, without sudden movements and systematically.

In addition to a set of exercises, try to take the elevator less, and rather walk up the stairs. This will be a workout for both your legs, hips, butt and spine.

It is important to walk in the fresh air, drink plenty of fluids, and eat foods rich in proteins, fats and carbohydrates. If necessary, after consulting a doctor, you can take a course of vitamins and minerals to strengthen the immune system and maintain muscle mass. By following all the recommendations described above, any woman can make her figure attractive, and her hips and buttocks rounded and expanded.

Calcium intake during the day

Calcium is an essential nutrient for bone health. Because the population's bones break and grow every day, it is important that people get enough calcium in their diet.

The best way to absorb calcium is to eat small, high-calcium foods throughout the day rather than eating them all in one meal.

It is best to get calcium from your diet, unless your doctor advises otherwise. Calcium rich foods:

• milk
• cheese
• yogurt
• some leafy greens such as kale
• beans
• sardines

How to visually enlarge your hips with clothes?

If you are not going to the beach or to the pool, where it will be difficult to disguise your problem hips under a swimsuit, then you can work on your appearance, which will help visually make your figure more proportional.

If we talk about trousers, then tapered and straight options are not for you; the best way out of the situation is tapered trousers, which expand quite well in the right place. Use the upper part of your clothing - it should attract minimal attention to the shoulders and chest, unless you want to gain a significant advantage in the upper zone. Always try to highlight the waistline - with the help of belts, tapered blousons and jackets.

loading…

loading…

In order for your legs to match your beautiful, pumped torso, you need to devote time to them. To build bigger thighs, use a barbell and a high-protein diet.

Exercises with a barbell for the beauty of the hips:

1. Coming close to the barbell lying on the floor, squat down and touch it with your knees. With your arms wide apart, grab the bar. Bend at the lower back, spread your shoulder blades and straighten your arms. Moving powerfully, stand on your feet, straightening your body and shrugging your shoulders. The barbell should be lifted close to the body. Having raised the projectile to chest level, squat under it, bringing your elbows forward, place it on your shoulders. Then carefully place the barbell on the floor and repeat the exercise;
2. Place the apparatus on the front deltoid muscles and spread your legs wide apart. Tilt your pelvis back a little, bend your knees a little and try to sit down well. It is important to lower the hip joints below the knee joints. Return to the original position and perform the exercise one more time;
3. With the barbell on your back and your feet shoulder-width apart, bend your knees. Taking a wide step back, bend both legs and try to keep your weight on your front leg. Returning to the starting position, lunge with your other leg. Repeat the exercise several times for each leg;
4. Wrap your hands wide around the bar. With your elbows straight, place the barbell above your head. Squat down. Returning to the starting position, do this exercise several more times;
5. Having placed the apparatus on the floor, squat down and touch the bar firmly with your shins. Arch your lower back slightly. Grab the barbell with your hands slightly wider than shoulder-width apart. Push off the floor with your feet and lift the projectile. Aligning it with your knees, straighten your body and stand straight. Holding the barbell, lower yourself to the starting position and repeat;
6. Exercises should be done with both heavy and medium weights. The hip muscles are very well pumped with high-intensity short loads. It is recommended to do five repetitions with the maximum weight possible for you.

Eating foods rich in vitamins D and K

Foods rich in vitamin K-2, such as sauerkraut, play an important role in bone health by reducing calcium loss and helping minerals bind to bones.

• foods containing vitamin K-2:
• sour cabbage
• cheese
• natto (soy product)

Vitamin D helps the body absorb calcium. People deficient in this vitamin have a higher risk of bone loss.

A person can absorb vitamin D with moderate exposure to sunlight. A lack of this vitamin in the body leads to an increased risk of developing bone diseases such as osteoporosis or osteopenia.

Whose trouble?

Even doctors consider osteoporosis - increased bone fragility - a women's problem. And in vain! The risk of osteoporosis is 27% higher than prostate cancer. And hip fracture (the main complication of osteoporosis) occurs more often in 50-year-old men than in women.

“After this injury, 50% remain disabled,” says Olga Ershova, professor at the Yaroslavl State Medical Academy, vice-president of the Russian Association for Osteoporosis . “In Russia, the prevalence of male osteoporosis is one of the highest in the world.”

Eat more protein foods

Protein plays an important role in bone health and density, so you need to make sure you have enough in your diet.

The study, which included nearly 144,000 postmenopausal participants, found that those who consumed higher amounts of protein experienced an increase in overall bone density. These participants had fewer forearm fractures when they were involved in accidents.

Talk to your doctor before making significant changes to your protein intake.

You need to have time to expand your skeleton before the age of 20!

Scrolling through the wealth of information about training to expand the chest, several solid conclusions emerge:

1. You need to do skeletal stretching before the age of 20. It is during this period that the cartilage is able to increase slightly.
2. Doctors categorically answer that it is impossible to achieve expansion of the skeleton. They connect this with the anatomy of the human body. If you look at a picture of a human skeleton from an anatomy textbook, it will become clear that the ribs at the back smoothly flow into the spine. In front they are attached to the sternum using cartilage. A sports set of exercises is aimed at changing cartilage tissue. But doctors say that it is impossible to change these sizes with training. Otherwise, it would affect the entire motor ability of the body. In general, medicine does not approve of such actions and questions them.
3. It has also been proven that regular physical activity strengthens the human skeleton. The bone becomes hard and even increases in size. Growth hormone is responsible for this function of the body. In childhood, these processes occur at an accelerated pace, since the child becomes strong and the skeleton more powerful in a short period of time.
4. If you are 25 years old, then forget about the fact that you can influence the skeleton of the sternum. Here's another interesting fact from the anatomy of living creatures. When a baby is born, its chest is compared to a shape reminiscent of an animal skeleton. In their four-legged counterparts, the chest is noticeably flattened on the sides. This form is optimal for their lifestyle. But man does not want to run on four bones; he is an upright creature. Due to the load, the breasts become rounded and larger. If you use this anatomical ability wisely, you can “deceive” nature a little. The main thing is to do it before the age of 20.

As you can see, time matters.

Consuming foods rich in magnesium and zinc

Eating nuts can support bone health and density due to their high magnesium content.

Like calcium, magnesium and zinc are minerals that provide good support for bone health and density.

Magnesium helps activate vitamin D, promoting calcium absorption, while zinc promotes bone growth and helps prevent bone breakdown.

Foods rich in magnesium and zinc:

• nuts
• legumes
• seeds
• whole plant grains

How the pelvis “breathes”

The movement of the pelvis during inhalation and exhalation with elastic ligaments should be noticeable. If, when inhaling, you try to draw in air, expanding your stomach, lowering the diaphragm down, then the pelvic bones will move. This type of breathing is called diaphragmatic breathing, it is natural for a healthy body, and only stress and poor lifestyle make us breathe shallowly.

In order for the baby to pass properly through the birth canal, as well as to relieve pain from contractions, during childbirth you need to breathe so that the pelvis expands. To check how correctly you are breathing, you need an assistant who will observe the movements of the pelvis during breathing. It is more convenient for an assistant to observe the pelvis when the expectant mother sits “astride” on a chair, leaning on the back of the chair.

She puts her head in her hands and rounds her back. Her tailbone is not touching the chair. An assistant observes the movement of the pelvis from the back. Observe your breathing by placing your palms on your shoulder blades. To see how the pelvis “breathes,” the assistant first tries to follow the desired movement under his palms at the level of the shoulder blades. The assistant places his palms on the mother's shoulder blades, the thumbs are joined together in the middle of the back, the remaining fingers are spread apart.

Mom takes a breath - and the assistant watches how his thumbs move apart. Exhale - fingers connect. Observe your breathing by placing your palms on the diaphragm. Let's watch a little lower how the pregnant woman's breathing spreads the assistant's hands. He now places his palms at the level of the diaphragm. And he also watches how his thumbs move apart as his mother inhales.

Main types

It is customary to roughly divide people into different body types, where three key categories can be distinguished:

1. An ectomorph is a person who tends to be thin.
2. A mesomorph is a person with an athletic build who has muscles gifted by nature.
3. An endomorph is a person who is prone to gaining excess weight.

His future athletic success will depend on what type of figure a person has.

Ectomorph

This category of people describes guys with a thin build. Typically, ectomorphs have narrow wrists and ankles, as do their hips and waist. They cannot boast of muscle mass, and they have virtually no fat accumulation. This figure is often called skinny.

Ectomorph people have a fairly fast metabolism. The main problem is that it is quite difficult for a thin person to gain muscle mass. Due to a fast metabolism, all calories eaten are quickly burned, and therefore people with this type need to consume as many calories as possible. It is recommended to include vitamins, protein shakes, mass gainers and omega-3 fats.

The main advantage is the absence of any problems with excess weight. Drying muscles is easier compared to mesomorphs and endomorphs.

You can take a closer look at this type of figure and give it an assessment in the photo.

Mesomorph

People with this figure have a massive skeleton and an athletic or average build. It is easier for them to build muscle, unlike ectomorphs.

Peculiarities:

• good metabolism;
• If you have fat deposits, you can easily get rid of them by following proper nutrition.
• good muscle growth during training.

The muscles of this type of people respond well to power loads and their rapid growth is felt, especially among beginner athletes. But if you don't pay enough attention to nutrition, you can gain excess weight. In this case, you will need to add cardio training to get rid of accumulated fat so that the man has an athletic appearance.

Endomorph

People with this figure have a round, wide and soft, dense physique. As a rule, they are short in stature. The length of their arms and legs is short. These people naturally have strong legs, due to which they can show good results when training the lower body.

Peculiarities:

• slow metabolism;
• wide hips, similar waist and shoulders;
• short legs;
• If you eat incorrectly, you will quickly gain excess weight.

Endomorphs can easily gain the required muscle mass through training. But along with muscles comes an increase in body fat, and because of this, they appear obese in appearance. In order to gain as little fat as possible, you should pay due attention to cardio training, and also do not forget about proper nutrition, monitoring the total calorie content of your food.