Bone health articles are not just for those of us leaning toward those mid to older ages.  Most people reach peak bone mass by the age of 30.  So, starting young to maximize that peak is one way to take care of your body when you are younger. As you age, the focus is on keeping the bones healthy without loss.  Yoga can help you do that in ways other exercises can’t!  Whether you are younger or older, have healthy or struggling bones, this is for you!   

Most of us know the basics about our bones.  They support our frame, protect our organs, and join with our muscles and connective tissues to allow us to move.  There’s more to bones though! Our bones are complex living organs that provide much more than structural support.  In our discussion here we will overview the various functions of our bones and then highlight why yoga therapy is integral to any plan to keep them healthy at any age.

You might imagine the skeleton from science class when you think of your bones, rigid and fixed.  Actually your bones are a careful mixture of hard and soft to allow for stability, resilience and nutrient delivery!  They are a combination of compact bone (dense), spongy bone (think a kitchen sponge) and bone marrow (like thick soup or jelly).  Your bones not only have enough strength to hold you up, but also enough flexibility so they can handle stress without snapping. In the center of your bones, marrow is full of stem cells that create white blood cells for immune support, red blood cells for nutrient transport, and platelets for blood clotting.  Your bones also store fat and minerals critical to body function.  Blood vessels and veins run throughout all three types of your bones.  

Like other cells and processes in your body, your bones slowly grow and repair themselves.  Osteoblasts synthesize new bone and osteoclasts break down and absorb old bone tissue.  At some point in your life, osteoclasts will begin to break down bone faster than osteoblasts can create new bone.  Diagnostically, this is osteoporosis.  What this means for you is a higher risk of falls, bone breaks and fractures, hunched posture, body pain and disability. Often this happens earlier for women, but up to 25% of all fractures that occur in people over 50, occur in men.

Common recommendations to prevent, slow, and even improve osteoporosis are exercise, diet, vitamins, and medications.  The exercise recommendations to prevent and/or treat osteoporosis include: weight bearing/ impact loading, muscle strengthening, balance, and flexibility.  Yoga falls under the “exercise” category here, with a couple of standard warnings to avoid certain twists or bends.   But yoga is more than just a physical practice.  Both the body and mind are positively affected by breathwork, postures, and meditation.  Let’s explore.

The Body

The optimal approach to bone health often involves a combination of weight-bearing exercises, resistance training, and activities that promote flexibility and balance.  Yoga fits all these categories and can complement any other routine such as cardio and weightlifting. When a yoga pose is held for about at least 20 seconds, the body gets messaging to remodel bone!  Yoga has been proven to REVERSE bone loss in those with osteoporosis and osteopenia.  But let’s look at how yoga stimulates change differently from other exercises.

Multi-Directional Stress:

Yoga involves a wide range of postures and movements that apply stress to bones from multiple directions. Traditional weight-bearing exercises like walking or running primarily involve stress in one direction (vertical loading). In contrast, yoga poses often include movements and positions that apply forces in different planes, providing a more comprehensive stress to bones.  When the bones feel stress from different directions, they reinforce to handle weight from those angles, creating a more stable system.  

Isometric Contractions:
Many yoga poses involve isometric contractions, where muscles engage without significant joint movement. Isometric contractions can stimulate bone density by applying stress to the bones without the impact of dynamic movements.  

Body Weight Resistance:
Yoga often relies on using one's body weight as resistance, which can be effective for building bone density. Poses like Downward-Facing Dog, Plank, and Warrior Poses require the muscles to support the body against gravity, contributing to bone strength.

Balance and Stability:
Yoga emphasizes balance and stability, requiring engagement of smaller stabilizing muscles around joints. These stability-focused poses contribute to bone health by enhancing overall musculoskeletal function.  Yoga poses also challenge the spine, hands and feet, which aid in stability.  In fact, yoga is especially useful at improving something called “proprioception”.  Proprioception is the ability of your body to sense where it is in space without the use of your vision.  It is basically the communication system between your muscles and your brain about your position.  Yoga stands out here due to the mind-body-breath connection during practice, the attention to weight shifting and bearing, varied movement patterns like bends/twists and balances with slow and controlled movements, all that require a focus that improves balance and reduces falls.  Practicing barefoot, when possible, also helps to build receptivity and responsiveness of where the body is in space.

Stretching and Compression:
Yoga includes a combination of stretching and compression, promoting flexibility and strength simultaneously. Poses that involve stretching can stimulate bone remodeling, and compression, as seen in weight-bearing poses, contributes to bone density. 

Circulation:
Circulation is important for our bones.  It helps nutrients and oxygen get to our bone cells, removes waste products from our bone tissue, distributes hormones throughout our bodies that control bone growth, and it helps our bones heal in the event of an injury.  While lots of physical activities are helpful for circulation, yoga helps in these unique ways: reducing stress, therefore allowing blood vessels to open, enhancing lung capacity through breathing exercises, balance and inversion poses that promote blood flow and venous return to many areas, posture correction that encourages blood flow into stagnant areas, and adaptable practices for all individuals no matter their physical abilities.

The Mind
What does your mind have to do with your bones?  It is connected in a number of ways and yoga (including meditation and breathwork) can support a healthy mind. Chronic stress can lead to an increase in the production of stress hormones, such as cortisol. Elevated cortisol levels over the long term may interfere with bone formation and contribute to bone loss by suppressing the activity of osteoblasts and enhancing the activity of osteoclasts, leading to a decrease in bone formation and an increase in bone resorption.  Additionally high cortisol levels can increase inflammation which also disturbs the balance between formation and absorption of bone.  Stress can contribute to loss of sleep and less than optimal lifestyle choices.

Reducing Stress:
Countless studies have shown that yoga, meditation, and breathwork can reduce cortisol, inflammation, depression, anxiety, stress, blood pressure, and heart rate.  And increase mood, resilience, pain tolerance, energy, and more.  Much of this has to do with the engagement of the parasympathetic nervous system while you practice.  The PNS is responsible for letting your mind know it is safe to decrease resistance, fear, stress, respiratory rate, heart rate, blood pressure and increase digestion, cell repair, circulation to your organs, and feelings of contentment.  Additionally, yoga may help you reduce or avoid medications to treat some stress related conditions.  Medications can cause drowsiness which can interfere with balance and stability, contributing to falls and fractures.

Improving Sleep:
Deep sleep stimulates growth, regeneration, and repair of bones and other tissues and supports a balance between osteoblast and osteoclast activity.  It gives us energy to exercise the following day and helps us absorb calcium which is essential for bone health.  Additionally, good sleep helps regulate cortisol and stress levels we mentioned above.  Both a painful body and a painful mind can interfere with sleep.  And they are closely connected.  Lack of deep sleep can contribute to body pain because processes for tissue repair, collagen and bone protein synthesis happen during deep sleep. Body pain can also prevent sleep so this can become a cycle.  An aggravated or busy mind can work against itself when it is time to sleep.  Most of us know what this feels like when our brains won’t shut down at night.  Although a specific routine can vary depending on the reason for the sleep disturbance and the individual’s history, a combination of movement, breathing, and meditation has been proven to contribute to less sleep latency, more deep sleep, less sleep disturbances, and better sleep efficiency.

Encouraging Positive Behaviors:
When we are experiencing stress, it is easy to reach for the simplest or fastest way to remedy the situation.  For some of us this can look like reaching for alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, or unhealthy food.  All of these things can negatively impact bone health.  By promoting and increasing overall quality of life, yoga can reduce the urges of addictions and harmful behaviors toward ourselves (and others).

Conclusion
Our bodies work well when we find balance in our lives.  The practice of yoga for physical and emotional health goes much deeper than the body and mind discussed here.  But these ideas are a good place to begin when considering bone health.  Sometimes the solution starts somewhere far away from where we feel or notice the problem.  

Works Cited

“Bone Anatomy | Ask A Biologist.” Ask A Biologist |, https://askabiologist.asu.edu/bone-anatomy. Accessed 7 October 2023.

Fishman, Loren, and Ellen Saltonstall. Yoga for Osteoporosis: The Complete Guide. W. W. Norton, 2010.

“Impact of long term Yoga practice on sleep quality and quality of life in the elderly.” NCBI, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3667430/. Accessed 7 October 2023.

“Osteoporosis Causes & Symptoms | NIAMS.” National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, 1 December 2022, https://www.niams.nih.gov/health-topics/osteoporosis. Accessed 7 October 2023.

“Osteoporosis in men.” Better Health Channel, https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/osteoporosis-in-men. Accessed 7 October 2023.

“Twelve-Minute Daily Yoga Regimen Reverses Osteoporotic Bone Loss.” NCBI, 5 November 2015, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4851231/. Accessed 7 October 2023.

Wei, Marlynn. “Yoga could slow the harmful effects of stress and inflammation.” Harvard Health, 19 October 2017, https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/yoga-could-slow-the-harmful-effects-of-stress-and-inflammation-2017101912588. Accessed 7 October 2023.

Woodyard, Catherine. “Exploring the therapeutic effects of yoga and its ability to increase quality of life.” NCBI, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3193654/. Accessed 7 October 2023.

Yoga Therapy Today. “Yoga Therapy for Our Vital Bones.” Yoga Therapy Today, 9 March 2019, https://3greencircles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/YTT-Summer-2023_CE-Article-Ray.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0OHBnYxdQWgB1G3M-vdy_xob0QcY3EJXe45KwOHlVv511bFWQVjmPq2xg_aem_AcsiuadziNvVn9jPbc8rfVRY3ojpppwXh9cIfCoWW3-63ctX5igp0FtBpd29yrNgBsI. Accessed 7 October 2023.

Image:

Skeleton Image - https://unsplash.com/photos/JZOyQluj8eY?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink