Pilates Girls, You're Losing Bone. The Exercise Science of Building Bone After 40 with Prof Belinda Beck

All right.

I'd love to start this conversation with an understanding, and I think you're the perfect person to do this, to understand the physiology of bone.

So being a, a doctor of chiropractic myself, bones are my bread and butter.

So let's talk a little bit about different types of bones and then what the bone is actually made up of through the body.

Yeah.

So th- there's actually two different ways to look at types of bone.

You can think of it in terms of their overall shape, because we describe bones as long bones, like the long bones in our limbs, including the bones in our fingers are considered to be long bones 'cause they're longer than they are wide.

And then we have short bones, like the ones in our ankles and wrist.

And then we have irregular bones, like our shoulder blade, and we have flat bones, like our skull and our sternum.

The ones that are in our spine which are typically affected by osteoporosis first or most noticeably are irregular bones.

Now, within each of those bones, there's two different kinds of bone tissue.

One is as, as you mentioned, compact bone, and that is typically the shell.

It's around the outside.

And inside is trabecular bone or spongy bone, cancellous bone.

The- that's all the same thing, and that's like a very interconnected network of spicules, beams, and struts of bone that has this wonderful effect of reducing the weight of bone, but because of the way those beams are oriented is still extremely strong, and we can talk about how that gets weak and, and quickly with osteoporosis.

One thing to mention is that you don't have trabecular bone in every part of every bone.

In the long bones, for example, in the shaft in the middle of your, your thigh, that's all cortical bone.

It's like a tube of very thick, dense bone.

Most of that tr- trabecular bone is in the ends of long bones or in the middle of short, irregular, and flat bones.

Right.

So in the vertebral body, for example, most of that is gonna be cancellous or most of that is gonna be that trabecular bone that is gonna be absorbing most of the forces, correct?

That's right.

The vast majority of the body of the trabecular, every, the-- our weight is, is borne through our spine on these blocks of bone, our vertebrae, vertebral bones.

The reason why they're called irregular is 'cause out the back of the vertebrae they have the neural arch, which is an arch of bone that has lots of lumps and bumps on it for the attachment of muscles and for the-- and to allow them to interconnect with each other.

But where osteoporosis affects most noticeably is in that drum-like portion at the front, which is the weight-bearing part, and it is 100% primarily trabecular bone with a thin cortical shell around it.

All right.

I'd love to start this conversation with an understanding, and I think you're the perfect person to do this, to understand the physiology of bone.

So being a, a doctor of chiropractic myself, bones are my bread and butter.

So let's talk a little bit about different types of bones and then what the bone is actually made up of through the body.

Yeah.

So th- there's actually two different ways to look at types of bone.

You can think of it in terms of their overall shape, because we describe bones as long bones, like the long bones in our limbs, including the bones in our fingers are considered to be long bones 'cause they're longer than they are wide.

And then we have short bones, like the ones in our ankles and wrist.

And then we have irregular bones, like our shoulder blade, and we have flat bones, like our skull and our sternum.

The ones that are in our spine which are typically affected by osteoporosis first or most noticeably are irregular bones.

Now, within each of those bones, there's two different kinds of bone tissue.

One is as, as you mentioned, compact bone, and that is typically the shell.

It's around the outside.

And inside is trabecular bone or spongy bone, cancellous bone.

The- that's all the same thing, and that's like a very interconnected network of spicules, beams, and struts of bone that has this wonderful effect of reducing the weight of bone, but because of the way those beams are oriented is still extremely strong, and we can talk about how that gets weak and, and quickly with osteoporosis.

One thing to mention is that you don't have trabecular bone in every part of every bone.

In the long bones, for example, in the shaft in the middle of your, your thigh, that's all cortical bone.

It's like a tube of very thick, dense bone.

Most of that tr- trabecular bone is in the ends of long bones or in the middle of short, irregular, and flat bones.

Right.

So in the vertebral body, for example, most of that is gonna be cancellous or most of that is gonna be that trabecular bone that is gonna be absorbing most of the forces, correct?

That's right.

The vast majority of the body of the trabecular, every, the-- our weight is, is borne through our spine on these blocks of bone, our vertebrae, vertebral bones.

The reason why they're called irregular is 'cause out the back of the vertebrae they have the neural arch, which is an arch of bone that has lots of lumps and bumps on it for the attachment of muscles and for the-- and to allow them to interconnect with each other.

But where osteoporosis affects most noticeably is in that drum-like portion at the front, which is the weight-bearing part, and it is 100% primarily trabecular bone with a thin cortical shell around it.