Why Endurance Athletes Get Stress Fractures: Training Load, Underfueling and Bone Health

So like I said, this is episode 118.

So let's let's talk a little bit about the anatomy and physiologic physiology of the bone, just so that we have a basic understanding of the structure.

Yeah, I just, I think it's helpful to review.

I mean, obviously people can look this up, but I think it's helpful to remember.

So there are different kinds of bones that are, they're just shaped differently.

You kind of have like your long bones, which may be like the limb bones in your limbs.

Like, The femur would be an example.

You have kind of your lumpy short bones, which would be like the bones that you might have in like wrists or ankles.

They're just kind of lumpy, you know, smaller, lumpier bones or maybe not necessarily small.

But and then you kind of have these irregular bones like your vertebrae, which have, you know, they have different shapes to them.

They're a little bit irregular, I suppose.

Yeah.

Um, so those are just different kinds of bones that we have, um, you know, all sorts of obviously bones in her body and the different shapes.

Um, the two different, um, types of bone would be a cortical bone, which is like the compact.

So.

I'm going to think of this like the outside of our bones have more cortical bones and then the inside of the bone is more of this spongy material called trabecular bone.

And that's just so in all of the different kinds of bones, there's the cortical and the trabecular.

Just the amounts of each is a little bit different depending on the type of bone.

But that's just that's just kind of so if you were to cut the bone open, you might even be able to see those different layers in there a little bit.

Bones are like.

awesome because the way that they're structured is in such a way it's just the amount of load that our bones can actually handle is pretty amazing if you kind of think about it, the structure of the bone and how much we can actually load onto the bone.

So I think it's important to really have a very strong respect and awe of how amazing it is, how they're formed and how amazing they are.

They're just resistant to like loading both you know, loading from the top sort of down and also like twisting, loading, you know, twisting movements that we do and that sort of loading.

So it's able to sort of that bending and then the gravity forces, our bones are able to handle both types of loading, which is great.

I mean, to a point, obviously we can break bones and that does happen, but the amount we can put onto the bone is quite amazing, I think.