Yoga for Osteoporosis – by Dr. Loren Fishman

This is not your average yoga book. In fact, the yoga poses themselves do not start until chapter nine. So, what’s going on for the first eight chapters?

Written by an MD and professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation, we are first treated to a very in-depth explanation of the anatomy, physiology, histology, pathology, and epidemiology of osteoporosis and many related issues, bones in good health, factors that affect same, how exercise works for bones in far more detail than this reviewer has seen in any book about exercise or osteoporosis, the physics at hand, and an overview of what yoga has going for it in this regard, since usually there is the concern: we want high-impact work to strengthen bones, but in the case of osteoporosis, that can break them, so instead, yoga’s dynamic tension comes into (safe) play.

When we say “more detail”, you will learn like a medical student the many different kinds of cells involved, each with wildly different structures as well as functions, how they react to different stimuli, how they interact with what we eat, and how to leverage all this information to our advantage. We also learn about how bone density, while important, is not the whole story, as bone quality matters a lot too, and this latter category is harder to measure, and/but can indeed be measured (and improved) in various ways.

The yoga itself is presented as various series of many well-illustrated poses, and a six-lesson course to progress through.

The style of the book is clinical and dense (with many scientific references), while still being perfectly comprehensible if one reads it in a methodical cover-to-cover fashion, and thus does not miss important information required for comprehension of later topics.

Bottom line: this is best book on this topic that this reviewer has encountered by far, and is highly recommended to anyone who cares about building and maintaining bone strength.

Click here to check out Yoga For Osteoporosis, and keep your bones safe!