The Worst Exercise For Your Bones!

so swimming is a really popular sport for kind of all ages but maybe it's not a good idea if you have osteoporosis so if you love swimming and you have osteoporosis let's dive into this question together so swimming is a popular sport for many reasons for young individuals it's fun it's competitive it's a blend of team and individual competition for older individuals or maybe those with some physical challenges it's a great way to push your body while protecting your joints totally get all that many people can do both resist distance training and cardiovascular training while avoiding joint or other pain that they would see elsewhere but what is the impact or lack thereof of swimming on our bones if someone has osteoporosis should swimming be a part of their comprehensive program so I'm going to tell you exactly what we tell our patients but first let's review some principles of bone growth now we've done numerous videos on exercise and osteoporosis and some of the principles that we've learned in this extensive research includes the import import of impact the importance of resistance and the importance of overall health which is why we created what we created but before I review the research if you are struggling to figure out what's the right combination of things for you consider our bone health masterclass link in the description on YouTube or on optimal human health.com all right so I'm going to tell you our exact Secret Sauce to cardio training but before I do let's discuss research on swimming specifically so this first study I want to review is is on 60 individuals it's from 2022 and the goal was to examine differences in concentrations of bone formation markers and resorption markers between adolescents female adolescent specifically swimmers soccer players and controls or non-athletes the soccer players had consistently higher bone formation markers and the results suggested that bone formation is higher in adolescent females engaged in High Impact Sports like soccer compared to both swimming and controls now I will say in this study that the swimmers and controls were not statistically significantly different although the swimmers were a little bit lower so this next study is a 2018 systematic review and meta analysis of 14 individuals now this study was trying to determine the effects of regular swimming on bone maneral density in young adults so now we're a little bit older right so these are 18 to 30 years old so swimmers were compared to non-athletic controls and again to high impact athletes so now we're getting a sense of what's happening in this age group kind of similar to the last study so what happen happened is the young adult swimmers had similar bone mineral density values to controls but again lower than the uh values of the high impact athletes which kind of makes sense right but I think we're just showing that swimming is certainly not benefiting bone and it's not benefiting bone significantly compared to controls so this third study is titled the effect of swimming during childhood and Adolescence on bone minerial density another systemic review and meta analysis so this is also on 14 studies published in 2016 what's compelling about this study though is that they looked at the femoral neck and lumbar spine bone Min neural density differences between swimmers and controls but what they saw is that they were able to look at this over time so what happened as these athletes aged and what they found is that the gap between swimmers and controls which was present in these studies the Gap got bigger so the controls continued to improve bowal density as an adult and the swimmers did not to the same degree so there was a difference that got bigger over time although there was not a difference between men and women in this study in 2016 was a bad year for swimming in studies on bone marrow density because there was another meta analysis of 29 studies that also showed that swimming had no positive effect for bone mass so again another study that points out that several studies are showing that that swimming is not a suitable exercise for prevention and treatment of osteoporosis this next study kind of goes a step further to say that while it might not be beneficial for bone health it doesn't seem like it's a negative for bone health either and I think what they were pointing out here is that because of the number of studies that showed that there was not much difference between s swimmers and controls that you don't necessarily need to consider swimming a negative for bone health but it's certainly not going to help you build bone all right so this last study is a study that I've actually published on before this is a 2012 review multiple studies that look at Runners cyclist and swimmers and so what they showed in this study is that swimmers between all of these endurance athletes swimmers had the lowest bone mineral density than the other athletes and I've talked about before that running is kind of a plus minus some people some Runners will see improvements in bone because of the impact but most Runners don't because the impact is not enough and also it is associated them with repetitive injury It's associated with generally underfeeding and all the things that go along with longdistance running and then cycling because there's no impact there's a little bit of resistance but you're kind of skirting around gravity although it doesn't feel like that on a bike but cyclists also tend to have lower bone mineral density so even though running and cycling are not great for bone either swimming is actually significantly worse so in conclusion what do we do well all exercise has benefit as long as it's done within one's unique capacity so I'm not saying that swimming is bad I think that swimming can be amazing because like I said before you can do a lot of stuff in the water that some people can't do out of the water so it is good exercise but what we tell our patients with osteoporosis is that if you love to swim swim but also do resistance training outside of the pool if you can do resistance training with gravity to your ability do some kind of impact training or simulated impact training like Osteo strong or whole body vibration in addition to all the other things that we talk about on this channel and with our patients this video was a review of swimming and osteoporosis and if you like this content consider this the best supplement to build muscle and bone during menopause and this one the truth about yoga and osteoporosis and remember that osteoporosis isn't the end but deciding to reverse it is a beginning