Your Bones Were Made For Moving Too!

We know that to look after bone health, resistance training is generally what’s indicated. Indeed, we mentioned it yesterday, and we’ve talked about it before:

Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)

We also know that if you have osteoporosis already, some exercises are a better or worse idea than others:

Osteoporosis & Exercises: Which To Do (And Which To Avoid)

However! New research suggests that also getting in your recommended 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise slows bone density loss.

The study by Dr. Tiina Savikangas et al. looked at 299 people in their 70s (just over half being women) and found that, over the course of a year, bone mineral density loss was inversely correlated with moderate exercise as recorded by an accelerometer (as found in most fitness-tracking wearables and smartphones).

In other words: those who got more minutes of exercise, kept more bone mineral density.

As well as monitoring bone mineral density, the study also looked at cross-sectional area, but that remained stable throughout.

As for how much is needed:

❝Even short bursts of activity can be significant for the skeleton, so we also looked at movement in terms of the number and intensity of individual impacts. For example, walking and running cause impacts of different intensities.

We found that impacts that were comparable to at least brisk walking were associated with better preservation of bone mineral density.❞

~ Dr. Tiina Savikangas

Read more: Impacts during everyday physical activity can slow bone loss ← pop-science source, interviewing the lead researcher

On which note, we’ve a small bone to pick…

As a small correction, the pop-science source says that the subjects’ ages ranged from 70 to 85 years; the paper, meanwhile, clearly shows that the age-range was 74.4±3.9 years (shown in the “Results” table), rounded to 74.4 ± 4 years, in the abstract. So, certainly no participant was older than 78 years and four months.

Why this matters: the age range itself may be critical or it might not, but what is important is that this highlights how we shouldn’t just believe figures cited in pop-science articles, and it’s always good to click through to the source!

Read the study: Changes in femoral neck bone mineral density and structural strength during a 12-month multicomponent exercise intervention among older adults – Does accelerometer-measured physical activity matter?

This paper is a particularly fascinating read if you have time, because—unlike a lot of studies—they really took great care to note what exactly can and cannot be inferred from the data, and how and why.

Especially noteworthy was the diligence with which they either controlled for, or recognized that they could not control for, far more variables than most studies even bother to mention.

This kind of transparency is critical for good science, and we’d love to see more of it!

Want to apply this to your life?

Tracking minutes-of-movement is one of the things that fitness trackers are best at, so connect your favourite app (one of these days we’ll do a fitness tracker comparison article) and get moving!

And as for the other things that fitness trackers do? As it turns out, they do have their strengths and weaknesses, which are good to bear in mind:

Thinking of using an activity tracker to achieve your exercise goals? Here’s where it can help—and where it probably won’t

Take care!

Long COVID and Chronic Fatigue

Getting COVID-19 can be very physically draining, so it’s no surprise that getting Long COVID can (and usually does) result in chronic fatigue.

But, what does this mean and what can we do about it?

What makes Long COVID “long”

Long COVID is generally defined as COVID-19 whose symptoms last longer than 28 days, but in reality the symptoms not only tend to last for much longer than that, but also, they can be quite distinct.

Here’s a large (3,762 participants) study of Long COVID, which looked at 203 symptoms:

Characterizing long COVID in an international cohort: 7 months of symptoms and their impact

Three symptoms stood at out as most prevalent:

1. Chronic fatigue (CFS)
2. Cognitive dysfunction
3. Post-exertional malaise (PEM)

The latter means “the symptoms get worse following physical or mental exertion”.

CFS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is also called Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME).

What can be done about it?

The main “thing that people do about it” is to reduce their workload to what they can do, but this is not viable for everyone. Note that work doesn’t just mean “one’s profession”, but anything that requires physical or mental energy, including:

• Childcare
• Housework
• Errand-running
• Personal hygiene/maintenance

For many, this means having to get someone else to do the things—either with support of family and friends, or by hiring help. For many who don’t have those safety nets available, this means things simply not getting done.

That seems bleak; isn’t there anything more we can do?

Doctors’ recommendations are chiefly “wait it out and hope for the best”, which is not encouraging. Some people do recover from Long COVID; for others, it so far appears it might be lifelong. We just don’t know yet.

Doctors also recommend to journal, not for the usual mental health benefits, but because that is data collection. Patients who journal about their symptoms and then discuss those symptoms with their doctors, are contributing to the “big picture” of what Long COVID and its associated ME/CFS look like.

You may notice that that’s not so much saying what doctors can do for you, so much as what you can do for doctors (and in the big picture, eventually help them help people, which might include you).

So, is there any support for individuals with Long COVID ME/CFS?

Medically, no. Not that we could find.

However! Socially, there are grassroots support networks, that may be able to offer direct assistance, or at least point individuals to useful local resources.

Grassroots initiatives include Long COVID SOS and the Patient-Led Research Collaborative.

The patient-led organization Body Politic also used to have such a group, until it shut down due to lack of funding, but they do still have a good resource list:

Click here to check out the Body Politic resource list (it has eight more specific resources)

Stay strong!