WORK OUT WITH WEIGHTS FOR HEALTHY BONES

You know you should be getting 30 minutes of weight-bearing aerobic exercise three times a week. If you don’t have a routine already, start with walking, as described in the previous chapter. Whatever you decide to do in the way of aerobics, strength training is a valuable addition because we know it builds bone more directly and efficiently than any other kind of exercise you can do.Anyone can do this routine and the one in the following chapter, no matter what your previous experience with exercise. It may take a little while to learn them and make the movements familiar. But with proper form (and your doctor’s OK, if necessary), both the strength training and yoga workouts are safe and effective at any fitness level. As your fitness increases, you’ll be able to do each move better, or longer, or with more resistance, or in a more advanced format. The routines automatically grow with you, so both beginning and advanced exercisers will benefit from them.For all the exercises here, there are a few ground rules that will help you get the most out of each movement and prevent injury. Before I start, let me warn you that these preliminaries— and the descriptions of the exercises themselves—will appear very mechanical as you read them over and will seem to involve a thousand tiny details. That’s a hazard of describing physical movements in words. Keep in mind that the goal is to use your body as Mother Nature intended, with the full range of motion, with the appropriate muscles engaged, and with smooth, natural movements. Pinning them down on paper forces them into a string of picky steps. Read them, so you’ll be able to check yourself if you work on your own. But the way to really know you’re doing it right is that it will feel as if your body was meant to do it. Movements may feel unfamiliar at first, of course. Particularly when you are isolating a particular muscle, it may feel strange; in everyday life, we generally use a combination of muscles for anything we do. But once you are used to performing a particular move, it shouldn’t feel awkward.We need “exercise” precisely because we don’t routinely use our bodies in a physical way. Thus the absurdity of a stair-climbing machine to nowhere. If we continually exploited and explored the physical possibilities and limitations of our bodies as a part of our daily lives, making a special trip to the gym would be laughable and unnecessary. If you’re like me, and spend most of your day relatively stationary, you do have to make a point of moving it if you don’t want to risk losing it. Even people who use their bodies a lot during the course of the day—delivering packages via bicycle, say, or loading heavy cargo onto trucks, or lifting, holding, and generally keeping up with infants and young children—don’t achieve overall fitness doing that alone because they use a limited variety of motions and muscles. Parents don’t get much in the way of aerobics; bike messengers don’t develop their upper-body muscles.Your body is a beautifully complex structure (consider just the elaborate interplay involved in creating and maintaining your bones), so just lifting your arm involves a whole host of actions, conscious and unconscious. Don’t get bogged down in the conscious efforts of the exercises described here. Take your time to learn them properly, and to familiarize your body with how it is meant to move. Then go with the flow.*123\228\2*

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