5 Exercises You Shouldn’t Do With Osteoporosis

Can you guess what they are?

Hold up a little…

Per Dr. Lisa Moore, anyone with osteoporosis or osteopenia should avoid movements that stress the spine in risky ways, for example:

• Sit-ups: avoid because they round your spine into flexion, increasing pressure on your vertebrae
• Crunches: avoid all variations (floor, ball, side) because repeated spinal rounding raises fracture risk
• Forceful pelvic tilts: avoid aggressive ab squeezing that flattens your lower back, as it mimics spinal flexion under load
• Russian twists: avoid because rapid, weighted rotation adds excessive torque to your spine
• Forward folds: avoid repeated spinal rounding in yoga or Pilates, including seated forward bends and lateral bending
• Jefferson curls: avoid because loaded spinal flexion (rolling down and up with weight) places high stress on weakened vertebrae

Instead, she recommends to focus on isometric exercises such as planks, using forearm, full, side, or hover planks to train your core without spinal movement.

The general idea is to brace your core with a neutral pelvis instead of moving your spine. And when it comes to hip-hinging, she recommends to bend forwards from your hips with a long spine, rather than rounding your back.

Indeed, in the video she cites a study that found the following correlations:

• Flexion exercises: 89% fracture rate
• Combined flexion/extension: 53% fracture rate
• Extension exercises: 16% fracture rate
• No exercise: 67% fracture rate

…which seems a fairly strong argument for extension exercises and not flexion exercises!

For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like:

Osteoporosis & Exercises: Which To Do (And Which To Avoid) ← for our main feature on this topic

Take care!