Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Menopause Strength Training and the Bone Density Myth | Ep 495

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Menopause Strength Training and the Bone Density Myth | Ep 495 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: If you've been told that you have to lift very heavy, you have to jump off of boxes, or you're just gonna lose your bone density.
• 0:07
  Philip Pape: And that message has been scaring you out of the gym.
• 0:10
  Philip Pape: This episode is for you.
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: Today you'll hear what heavy lifting actually does to bone density, how that compares to what happens during the menopause transition, independent of that, and why the aspect related to jumping is probably the weakest link in the argument we have from the evidence.
• 0:29
  Philip Pape: Also, I'm going to share one thing that protects you from a fracture far more than just bone density.
• 0:39
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:48
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and this is one of those episodes where I have to be very careful because the fitness advice I'm about to question is mostly coming from people I respect.
• 1:02
  Philip Pape: And it's even some things that I've stated or claimed that I'm gonna walk back a little bit on, which is really part of the process of skepticism and curiosity.
• 1:12
  Philip Pape: The science underneath it is genuinely good science.
• 1:16
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna tell you that lifting doesn't do anything for your bones.
• 1:20
  Philip Pape: Absolutely not.
• 1:21
  Philip Pape: It totally does.
• 1:22
  Philip Pape: What I want to do is show you the gap between what some of the evidence says and some of the evidence that's used often in the fitness industry on podcasts, social media, et cetera, and then how it evolved on social media versus what the reality is so that we can ground ourselves in reality.
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: And I care about this because some of what is circulating out there is scaring women.
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: I hear it constantly.
• 1:49
  Philip Pape: Someone in perimenopause, maybe early post-menopause, hears she needs to be squatting 85% of her one rep max.
• 1:56
  Philip Pape: And then she needs to be doing box jumps twice a week, or she's gonna lose her bone density.
• 2:03
  Philip Pape: And it creates this all or nothing thinking.
• 2:05
  Philip Pape: Well, I can't do that, so I guess I'm out.
• 2:08
  Philip Pape: And then maybe she doesn't do anything.
• 2:10
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're just thinking, well, it doesn't matter.
• 2:12
  Philip Pape: I, you know, let me go walk, let me do cardio, let me just lift lightly, whatever, and don't worry about it.
• 2:18
  Philip Pape: And I myself have talked about the value to bone density of lifting at a high percentage of your 1RM.
• 2:24
  Philip Pape: Now, usually when I do that, it's in a nuanced approach of it's just part of your lifting, right?
• 2:29
  Philip Pape: It's not like you have to do just that.
• 2:31
  Philip Pape: I also don't really talk about jumping too much, even though I have mentioned how some experts I've talked to, some of the science suggests that jumping is helpful to, you know, restore, especially if you have osteoporosis to reverse it or to add new bone density.
• 2:45
  Philip Pape: And there's some evidence that says, oh, maybe you can't create new bone density from lifting alone, et cetera.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: So we're gonna cover that today based on a rereading of the science.
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: And then stick around to the end because I'm going to give you a 30-second test that you can use where you could gauge whether the weight you've been putting on the bar, the dumbbells or machines or whatever is anywhere near the range that the research talks about.
• 3:10
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 3:10
  Philip Pape: So that's gonna help you ground in reality for yourself.
• 3:13
  Philip Pape: Am I lifting the way I want to lift for my goals?
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: Along the way, you're gonna hear about the lift more trial that I've mentioned a few times before and that we're revisiting, sort of what it concludes versus what it doesn't, even though people misinterpret it.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: And there's three specific places where I think the findings get stretched on social media.
• 3:32
  Philip Pape: We're gonna talk about the menopause transition, how that affects bone density, and we can compare it to this other stuff.
• 3:38
  Philip Pape: And then what I would suggest that you do about it from a practical standpoint, which is simpler and a lot less intimidating than you might think.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: So here we go.
• 3:48
  Philip Pape: Let's start with the Liftmore trial.
• 3:49
  Philip Pape: That's kind of the foundation of a lot of the claims.
• 3:52
  Philip Pape: Some of it, some of them good, some of them not so much.
• 3:55
  Philip Pape: It's called Liftmore, L-I-F-T-M-O-R.
• 3:57
  Philip Pape: Watson and colleagues out of Belinda Beck's group in Australia.
• 4:00
  Philip Pape: They published this in 2018.
• 4:02
  Philip Pape: Dr.
• 4:03
  Philip Pape: Beck is the real deal.
• 4:05
  Philip Pape: I think she has spent her, you know, entire career on studying bone and exercise.
• 4:10
  Philip Pape: And it's a very well-designed trial.
• 4:13
  Philip Pape: They took 101 postmenopausal women with low bone mass, the average age around 65, and they looked at them for eight months.
• 4:22
  Philip Pape: The training group did two supervised sessions a week: deadlift, overhead press, back squat, above 80% of their one rep max for five sets of five.
• 4:33
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 4:34
  Philip Pape: Plus, they did jumping chin-ups with a drop landing.
• 4:38
  Philip Pape: And so the results of that group are their lumbar spine bone density went up 2.9% in the training group, but it dropped 1.2% in the control group.
• 4:48
  Philip Pape: So the femoral neck, that's the top of your thigh bone where the hip fractures occur, it went up 0.3% in the training group and down 2% in the control group.
• 5:00
  Philip Pape: And then we have safety data that they measured, which is pretty cool.
• 5:04
  Philip Pape: Across more than 2,600 training sessions with women who had osteopenia and osteoporosis, there was only one adverse event.
• 5:11
  Philip Pape: It was a minor back spasm.
• 5:13
  Philip Pape: There weren't any fractures.
• 5:14
  Philip Pape: The leg extensor strength went up 37%, back extensor strength 36%, they got taller.
• 5:22
  Philip Pape: Okay, isn't that wild?
• 5:23
  Philip Pape: These women are in their 60s with thinning bones, they're deadlifting heavy, and they got taller and they didn't get injured.
• 5:33
  Philip Pape: Okay, so that's good to know.
• 5:35
  Philip Pape: When someone tells you, hey, lifting is heavy is dangerous for older women with low bone density, that's BS.
• 5:41
  Philip Pape: So that's really good information to know.
• 5:43
  Philip Pape: Now, what happened next?
• 5:44
  Philip Pape: Well, the the protocol from this research got turned into a licensed trademarked program that is sold to clinics.
• 5:53
  Philip Pape: And Dr.
• 5:54
  Philip Pape: Beck is a director and shareholder in the company that runs it, and they disclose that in the paper.
• 5:58
  Philip Pape: I don't have a problem with that.
• 6:00
  Philip Pape: It's the translational science, the methodology is sound.
• 6:04
  Philip Pape: I don't think there's anything shady with that.
• 6:06
  Philip Pape: Just because people are involved or there's funding from certain sources in and of itself isn't a reason to discount things.
• 6:12
  Philip Pape: But a lot of the you must train this exact way messaging is coming from people who sell, sell it that way.
• 6:22
  Philip Pape: And you have to know it.
• 6:23
  Philip Pape: You have to be able to question it.
• 6:26
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 6:27
  Philip Pape: So does it make sense?
• 6:28
  Philip Pape: Well, it doesn't make the science wrong, but it makes the certainty of it suspicious, right?
• 6:34
  Philip Pape: You just have to have to, if somebody's saying it has to be this way, I always question it.
• 6:38
  Philip Pape: And then that same information was used for other kind of nonsense or silly stuff, like the weighted vests, right?
• 6:45
  Philip Pape: Hey, you need to carry a specific percentage of body weight.
• 6:49
  Philip Pape: It's gonna help your bones.
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: The popular version that goes back to some trial from 2000, I think, is the foundation for a lot of the weighted vest stuff, right?
• 6:58
  Philip Pape: But it's not a mountain of evidence that it gets presented at.
• 7:01
  Philip Pape: There's currently no good evidence that walking around in a weighted vest raises your bone density, period.
• 7:05
  Philip Pape: So that's the origin of this information.
• 7:08
  Philip Pape: A really, really good trial.
• 7:09
  Philip Pape: There's the commercial program built from that trial.
• 7:11
  Philip Pape: And then a lot of, you know, the game of telephone on social media and people believing that, okay, on the other extreme here, anything short of five by five at 85% isn't effective in some way.
• 7:24
  Philip Pape: So hopefully I've never made that claim, right?
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: We always put it in the context of your lifestyle, a varied program, progressive overload, strength versus hypertrophy, all of that stuff.
• 7:34
  Philip Pape: Now, before I get into where the translation of the data went off that we need to kind of pull back on, I want to mention something that connects to this conversation.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: When you think of bone and bone density, it's downstream of hormones.
• 7:50
  Philip Pape: So there's a story here where what's happening to your skeleton and perimenopause is happening because estrogen is decreasing and estrogen is estrogen was kind of holding back the cells that break bone down, if you will, just to kind of layman's term the thing.
• 8:08
  Philip Pape: Training is, of course, a huge lever you have relative to that system, your body.
• 8:15
  Philip Pape: It's not the only lever, of course, but I don't think a lot of women get a clearer picture of how training and hormones fit together.
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: So a few years ago, I actually put up put together a guide called Strength Training for Hormone Health.
• 8:27
  Philip Pape: It still holds up.
• 8:27
  Philip Pape: I still think it's really helpful for those looking to lift in a way that's supportive of hormones, what it does and doesn't do, how to think about training if you're on hormone therapy or considering it, how to structure things through the transition, et cetera.
• 8:41
  Philip Pape: Very practical, very simple.
• 8:42
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash free or click the link in the show notes to get the strength training for hormone health guide.
• 8:48
  Philip Pape: I just wanted to mention that before we continue, in case you're looking for some more resources to do this.
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: And it's not, you know, all about percentages of one rep max.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: So we have the trial, we have the messaging on social media.
• 9:05
  Philip Pape: Let's look at where the gaps are.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: Okay, there's three things I mentioned, I think, in the intro where I have a problem with it.
• 9:11
  Philip Pape: And the first one is the comparison group.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: So in Liftmore, the control group, they were not doing moderate lifting.
• 9:19
  Philip Pape: They were giving, given basically a home exercise program that was extremely light.
• 9:25
  Philip Pape: It was hand weights that topped out at like three kilograms.
• 9:28
  Philip Pape: So you could say, well, then what the what the study showed is that heavy supervised training beats what amounts to almost nothing.
• 9:36
  Philip Pape: I mean, let's be honest, hand weights is almost nothing.
• 9:39
  Philip Pape: It's just walking around with a little bit, a few pounds, kind of like a weighted vest, actually.
• 9:43
  Philip Pape: But of course, it's going to beat that.
• 9:46
  Philip Pape: Pretty much any half-ass lifting program is going to beat you know the hand weights or the nothing.
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: So it can't tell you, oh, heavy training beats moderate training, because they didn't compare to that.
• 9:59
  Philip Pape: So if that that probably makes sense, right?
• 10:01
  Philip Pape: They didn't compare to moderate training or hypertrophy training or whatever.
• 10:05
  Philip Pape: It was just compared to almost nothing.
• 10:07
  Philip Pape: And you guys remember Dr.
• 10:08
  Philip Pape: Lauren Calenzo Semple from Mass.
• 10:11
  Philip Pape: She was on the show a while back.
• 10:12
  Philip Pape: And the point that she makes, I love the way she put it, she doesn't attack the trials, she just talks about what they can and can't tell us.
• 10:19
  Philip Pape: If you compare five by five against two-pound dumbbells, what are you gonna learn?
• 10:24
  Philip Pape: You're gonna learn that the two-pound dumbbells don't work too well.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: I guess that's helpful, but should be no surprise to you, dear listener, who listens to wits and weights.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: So that's the first one.
• 10:34
  Philip Pape: The second one is the measurement.
• 10:36
  Philip Pape: So this is where my engineering brain comes in.
• 10:39
  Philip Pape: They use DEXA.
• 10:40
  Philip Pape: So DEXA has a precision error.
• 10:42
  Philip Pape: I get that it's the gold standard for research.
• 10:45
  Philip Pape: And they have an error measure called the least significant change.
• 10:50
  Philip Pape: It's like the threshold below which your scan can't detect the real change from noise, so signal from noise.
• 10:57
  Philip Pape: So in a typical clinical practice, that's like two to four percent at the spine, and apparently it's three to six percent at the hip.
• 11:05
  Philip Pape: Now, if you look at the result from the femoral neck I mentioned earlier, of plus 0.3%, the authors themselves describe it as like a maintenance effect, which is actually a win in this case versus losing bone density.
• 11:20
  Philip Pape: Now, if you personally trained for eight months and then you went and you got scanned, the report's not going to tell you the difference between that and like nothing happened because of this error, because of the resolution of the measurement.
• 11:34
  Philip Pape: And that affects the conclusions we make out of this.
• 11:37
  Philip Pape: Because we're arguing very loudly about differences that the bone density scan might not be accurate enough to measure.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: So, especially at the individual level, like across 100 women in a trial, sure.
• 11:52
  Philip Pape: And we did see that the control group had the drop of, I think I'm saying it right, I think it was 2%, right?
• 11:58
  Philip Pape: I just want you to know that the measurement should be questioned when you look at these trials and also when you do it for yourself.
• 12:06
  Philip Pape: Like people reach out to me all the time about body fat and fat-free mass and all that.
• 12:09
  Philip Pape: And I usually just say, hey, just use the Navy formula and look at the trend over time.
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: Like don't overcomplicate it, don't rely on DEXs and in bodies and all that because of the error.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: The third gap I'll say is that the research on load, on the weight that you lift, I think isn't in full agreement.
• 12:27
  Philip Pape: At least not to the extent where we can just make a confident conclusion.
• 12:30
  Philip Pape: Like it's not settled.
• 12:32
  Philip Pape: And and I and you see this when you look at the best of the best, like Eric Helms, when he reviews the state of the literature, he'll even say, Well, this one says this, this one says this.
• 12:41
  Philip Pape: So where are we?
• 12:43
  Philip Pape: So Kissler, Fischbacher, and colleagues, so that's the Beck group that we already talked about with Lyftmore, they published a meta-analysis in 2021 and they found that high-intensity exercise was a better stimulus for the lumbar spine than low or moderate exercise.
• 12:58
  Philip Pape: But there was no advantage at the femoral neck.
• 13:01
  Philip Pape: And they said this.
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: Then Wang and colleagues in 2023, this was a network meta-analysis that combined 19 trials with 919 women.
• 13:12
  Philip Pape: They ranked moderate intensity, so that's like 65 to 80% of one rep max, as the highest performing for both the spine and the femoral neck.
• 13:24
  Philip Pape: So they rated it as better than heavy lifting, believe it or not.
• 13:29
  Philip Pape: And then a 2025 review said, no, no, no, wait, heavier lifting is actually more effective, but they use a different cutoff for what counts as heavy.
• 13:36
  Philip Pape: So if we're not even using the same percent RM, that's gonna cause a problem because we're just bucketizing as like heavy and moderate, but the numbers we're doing it aren't normalized.
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: That's a problem, right?
• 13:46
  Philip Pape: There was just this year, 2026, meta-analysis of 18 trials, and it found that high intensity training.
• 13:53
  Philip Pape: So again, we've talking intensity meaning weight, like load, was clearly better for leg strength.
• 13:58
  Philip Pape: I mean, I don't I don't have any con I don't have any problems with that conclusion.
• 14:02
  Philip Pape: It seems to make sense, but it found no significant difference between heavier and lighter training for bone density at the sites that they measured.
• 14:10
  Philip Pape: So here we have four meta-analysis, which is pretty high quality in the hierarchy of evidence that don't necessarily agree with each other.
• 14:17
  Philip Pape: What they do agree on is that resistance training is more beneficial than not.
• 14:24
  Philip Pape: So I don't know how helpful that is.
• 14:26
  Philip Pape: I guess what I'd have you take from that is that both moderate and heavy loading work.
• 14:31
  Philip Pape: The claim that heavy loading is required or that moderate loading is a waste of your time, that's definitely not supported.
• 14:38
  Philip Pape: And you have to be careful with that.
• 14:40
  Philip Pape: Okay, so that's the nuance.
• 14:42
  Philip Pape: Now, one last thing is what population was studied?
• 14:46
  Philip Pape: Because this was done in women who are on average 65 years old, at least five years past menopause.
• 14:52
  Philip Pape: Well, if you're 45 or 49, if you're in perimenopause, that's not you.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: But there is a trial on that population.
• 14:59
  Philip Pape: It's called Stop EM, stop-EM.
• 15:03
  Philip Pape: Whitman and colleagues, it was published this year out of Canada.
• 15:06
  Philip Pape: 40 women ages 45 to 60, and half of them perimenopausal.
• 15:11
  Philip Pape: So for nine months, twice a week, they trained five by five at 80 to 85% of their max.
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: And they used progressive drop landings.
• 15:23
  Philip Pape: And this was compared to people not doing this.
• 15:26
  Philip Pape: And they had huge gains in strength, 12 to 30 percent across the lifts.
• 15:30
  Philip Pape: And then they held on to their lean mass while the control group lost some lean mass.
• 15:35
  Philip Pape: Not surprising, right, to all of us here who know the value of lifting weights.
• 15:39
  Philip Pape: But then for bone density, the difference between the groups at the lumbar spine was two hundredths of a gram per square centimeter.
• 15:49
  Philip Pape: And the range of uncertainty around that was almost zero.
• 15:53
  Philip Pape: So, given that this was a feasibility trial, it was designed to test whether you could even just recruit and run the protocol.
• 16:01
  Philip Pape: It wasn't actually designed to detect a bone difference, and there was no moderate load comparison group.
• 16:07
  Philip Pape: So I think the honest conclusion is that we don't have enough data for perimenopausal women for the bone side of things.
• 16:17
  Philip Pape: We do for muscle.
• 16:18
  Philip Pape: I mean, we're starting to get more and more.
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: And it again, it's not to say that lifting isn't tremendously beneficial.
• 16:23
  Philip Pape: We know that.
• 16:23
  Philip Pape: It's more about the heavy versus the light and also the jumping piece.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: However, we do have the swan study.
• 16:29
  Philip Pape: Now, the swan study has followed women through the menopause transition for decades, and it gives us a pretty good picture of what's happening to your bone and when it happens.
• 16:39
  Philip Pape: So bone loss starts roughly a year before your final period and then accelerates really quickly for about three years.
• 16:47
  Philip Pape: During that window, the average woman is losing around 2.5% per year at the lumbar spine and just under 2% per year at the femoral neck.
• 16:58
  Philip Pape: And then it starts to slow down.
• 16:59
  Philip Pape: That loss starts to slow down.
• 17:00
  Philip Pape: So over the full menopause transition, that's roughly 10% loss of bone density.
• 17:07
  Philip Pape: So that's pretty decent.
• 17:09
  Philip Pape: That's pretty big.
• 17:10
  Philip Pape: The very best exercise trials we have are showing us one to three percent increase versus that 10%.
• 17:19
  Philip Pape: So if you think about the ratio, the question is can exercise rebuild what is lost during menopause?
• 17:27
  Philip Pape: This would seem to suggest not.
• 17:29
  Philip Pape: Now, I'm not trying to depress you or scare you.
• 17:32
  Philip Pape: We're trying to pick this apart, nuance and all.
• 17:36
  Philip Pape: So if you're going in starting to exercise or lift, expecting you're going to rebuild like all your bone density, and you don't, you might be disappointed.
• 17:45
  Philip Pape: But if you significantly attenuate that loss, that's actually a big win.
• 17:49
  Philip Pape: And that's kind of what we see is like, are we maintaining our bone density or avoiding as much of a loss?
• 17:56
  Philip Pape: And in some cases, we are restoring and building bone density.
• 17:59
  Philip Pape: So it's very highly individual.
• 18:01
  Philip Pape: And I'm not saying that it doesn't restore or build bone density.
• 18:04
  Philip Pape: In fact, we do see that at the individual level quite a bit, but anecdotally, it's hard to say from the literature one way or the other at the moment.
• 18:11
  Philip Pape: So I would rather you pretty much hold steady rather than lose 2% a year.
• 18:18
  Philip Pape: Wouldn't you?
• 18:19
  Philip Pape: Peak bone mass actually happens in your 20s.
• 18:22
  Philip Pape: So while you're pretty young, so really for the rest of your life, you're just managing against the loss.
• 18:29
  Philip Pape: Muscle is a bit different.
• 18:30
  Philip Pape: Muscle you can keep adding at any age.
• 18:32
  Philip Pape: So I think we're confusing the two a little bit.
• 18:34
  Philip Pape: Bone plays by a little bit different rules.
• 18:36
  Philip Pape: So what do you actually do about this?
• 18:38
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna give you four things to consider.
• 18:40
  Philip Pape: The first one is, of course, to lift weights progressively at a load that is genuinely hard for you and just keep doing that for years.
• 18:51
  Philip Pape: Somewhere in the range of 70 to 85% of your one rep max, two to three times a week on compound movements is a great foundation.
• 18:59
  Philip Pape: All the other stuff you want to have in there for hypertrophy, because you love it, because you want the variation, because you want to do different rep ranges, that is great.
• 19:08
  Philip Pape: I would just say if you have a squat pattern, hinge pattern, pressing, maybe some rowing in there, pulling, right?
• 19:14
  Philip Pape: Not necessarily rowing, but some type of pull.
• 19:17
  Philip Pape: So just having those different rep ranges, especially on the heavier side for a portion of your lifting is gonna be tremendous.
• 19:25
  Philip Pape: And the real thing I want you to pay attention here, it's not the percentage so much, it's the doing it for years consistently part.
• 19:33
  Philip Pape: I would rather you have a moderate program that you can run consistently and train hard with, even if it's not quote unquote heavy.
• 19:40
  Philip Pape: That's gonna pay off tremendously versus something you wouldn't run.
• 19:44
  Philip Pape: I'm not giving you permission to go easy, it's going to be hard.
• 19:48
  Philip Pape: And in fact, many find that the higher rep ranges are pretty mentally challenging anyway, and actually find lower rep ranges kind of enjoyable despite being heavy.
• 19:56
  Philip Pape: It's it's the difference between heavy but fewer reps and not as heavy but many more reps, and they're just different variables to play with.
• 20:03
  Philip Pape: So progressive overload over a long time horizon is the way to go.
• 20:07
  Philip Pape: Number two is to think about adding in balance and single leg work.
• 20:13
  Philip Pape: And this one, I'm a little bit, I'll say I have a little bit less expertise in, and honestly, the evidence or the research is not, I'm not gonna say it's not as solid, but you're not gonna hear this as much in the strength community.
• 20:24
  Philip Pape: I think it gets skipped a lot, but it could be very important.
• 20:27
  Philip Pape: And there's folks like Megan Dahlman who are really into this and do a great job.
• 20:30
  Philip Pape: I should have her on the show again, I think.
• 20:33
  Philip Pape: But, you know, we care about bone density because of fractures, and fractures, at least outside the spine, come from falling down.
• 20:41
  Philip Pape: Well, if you don't fall very often or at all, you overwhelmingly don't get fractures.
• 20:47
  Philip Pape: So we know that exercise reduces the rate of falls significantly, I think by as much as a quarter from some studies.
• 20:55
  Philip Pape: And, you know, balance training, functional training, if you want to call it, combined combining balance with resistance training.
• 21:02
  Philip Pape: I don't like the term functional training because I think lifting weights is functional.
• 21:07
  Philip Pape: Balance also comes from lifting weights.
• 21:09
  Philip Pape: However, the unilateral or the single leg work can increase your balance even further.
• 21:14
  Philip Pape: And so go ahead and do like the split squats or do the single arm whatever's deadlifts, RDL, et cetera.
• 21:21
  Philip Pape: Incorporate them and see if it doesn't help even further with the balance.
• 21:26
  Philip Pape: Okay, number three is impact.
• 21:30
  Philip Pape: So I think the jury is still out on this.
• 21:32
  Philip Pape: I think the jumping part of this, even though I mean I've had I've had folks on who are super smart talking about bone density and osteopenia osteoporosis, saying, you know, we probably need to have some jumping in there along with our lifting.
• 21:48
  Philip Pape: But, you know, if you if you've died, if you have diagnosed osteoporosis, or if you've had a previous like fidd fragility fracture, they call it, especially in your spine, or if you have a balance problems or history of Falls, or you're dealing with pelvic floor symptoms and leaking, or you know, you've never ever done jumping, you're probably okay.
• 22:08
  Philip Pape: And you always have to think of it as like, how do you ease into things?
• 22:10
  Philip Pape: How do you progress?
• 22:11
  Philip Pape: Think of it as progressive overload, think of it as a skill.
• 22:14
  Philip Pape: You look at something like the UK, they have this Royal Osteoporosis Society and they have a guidance statement that recommends lower impact instead of moderate impact for most people as a general rule, with higher impact only after someone has assessed you individually.
• 22:29
  Philip Pape: And so I'm not, as far as a coach goes, like I don't program jumping stuff.
• 22:34
  Philip Pape: And, you know, I worry about like people doing stupid things and getting injured.
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: I mean, I I used to do CrossFit.
• 22:40
  Philip Pape: So trust me, I know more than anyone.
• 22:42
  Philip Pape: And it's not about being cautious, it's more of just if you want to add impact, I want you to go to ladder it up, ladder it up.
• 22:51
  Philip Pape: You know, start with heel drops, then do skipping, then do two-footed hops, and just kind of build from there.
• 22:57
  Philip Pape: Like don't start on a box necessarily.
• 23:00
  Philip Pape: That's my thought on that.
• 23:01
  Philip Pape: And as a side tangent to that, there are some interest, there's some interesting research about vibration plate machines being helpful as providing the same kind of stimulus as jumping and impact.
• 23:12
  Philip Pape: So interesting.
• 23:13
  Philip Pape: Maybe I should do an episode on that in the future.
• 23:15
  Philip Pape: We'll see.
• 23:16
  Philip Pape: Number four is I want you to get the boring things locked down.
• 23:22
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 23:23
  Philip Pape: Get the boring things locked down.
• 23:24
  Philip Pape: And that would be your food, you know, your protein, your micronutrients.
• 23:28
  Philip Pape: Yeah, calcium, vitamin D, all of that is helpful for bone.
• 23:34
  Philip Pape: The biggest lever is still going to be your movement and your lifting.
• 23:38
  Philip Pape: But higher protein intake should help with your spine bone density.
• 23:43
  Philip Pape: We don't know that it's overly beneficial for other aspects, but high protein is beneficial for many, many other things.
• 23:49
  Philip Pape: Magic matters enormously for muscle, it matter, which itself helps your spine and bone and balance and not falling, et cetera.
• 23:57
  Philip Pape: So it's all connected, right?
• 23:58
  Philip Pape: It's I just like to separate what affects bone directly versus what affects it systematically, or by virtue of you being stronger or having more muscle.
• 24:06
  Philip Pape: If you have actual osteoporosis, please be talking to this with your doctor anyway.
• 24:10
  Philip Pape: I know there's all sorts of medications, there's biophosphates, there's like different types of exercise, different drugs now, all sorts of things happening, peptides, everything else.
• 24:19
  Philip Pape: I have no idea.
• 24:20
  Philip Pape: It's it's it's crazy.
• 24:21
  Philip Pape: So that's in the medical world.
• 24:23
  Philip Pape: I'm kind of staying out of that.
• 24:24
  Philip Pape: I'm dealing more with the lifestyle piece.
• 24:27
  Philip Pape: So, just in case you took the wrong message from this, I am not saying heavy lifting doesn't build bone.
• 24:32
  Philip Pape: It does.
• 24:33
  Philip Pape: I it also is essential, I would say.
• 24:37
  Philip Pape: I think the strength and muscle benefits in many of these trials are probably a lot larger and more certain in our claims than the bone benefits.
• 24:46
  Philip Pape: But you have tremendous bone benefits from lifting and possibly from jumping as well.
• 24:50
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 24:50
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying bone density doesn't matter either, of course.
• 24:53
  Philip Pape: It matters tremendously, but it may not be the only thing that determines things like fracture and break, you know, breaking your hip.
• 25:01
  Philip Pape: Like I said, being strong, being balanced.
• 25:03
  Philip Pape: Those are also tremendously important.
• 25:05
  Philip Pape: So it's not just about the bone density, it's all the other stuff around it.
• 25:08
  Philip Pape: And I'm also not saying you have to lift five by five, 85%, and use drop landings, and that's your program, right?
• 25:14
  Philip Pape: Like you've got a lot of flexibility here.
• 25:16
  Philip Pape: All right, before we wrap up, I'm gonna give you a 30-second test that you can start this week.
• 25:21
  Philip Pape: But before that, I did tell you about the 70 to 85% load of your one rep max.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: And I wanted to address that real quick because you're probably thinking, okay, I have no idea what that is.
• 25:31
  Philip Pape: Like, I don't know what my one rep max is.
• 25:33
  Philip Pape: How do I do this without getting crushed under a barbell or something?
• 25:36
  Philip Pape: And that's totally fair.
• 25:37
  Philip Pape: And you don't have to necessarily, you can start from a calculator to get in the range.
• 25:41
  Philip Pape: And I actually have a calculator on my website.
• 25:43
  Philip Pape: If you go to witsandweights.com slash calculators, I'll include the direct link in the show notes.
• 25:48
  Philip Pape: There's a strength calculator.
• 25:49
  Philip Pape: You put in the weight, a weight that you've actually lifted and how many reps you got, and it's going to estimate your one rep max based on the most useful formulas that are out there.
• 25:58
  Philip Pape: But it also gives you load ranges off of that.
• 26:00
  Philip Pape: It also gives you the strength standards.
• 26:02
  Philip Pape: So you can see where like your squat, your deadlift, your press sit for your age and body weight, which can be helpful.
• 26:08
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying it's be all end all.
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: There's a huge variation, but it's nice to kind of get you in the ballpark.
• 26:13
  Philip Pape: So go to wits and weights.com slash calculators, totally free to check that out.
• 26:17
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 26:17
  Philip Pape: Here's a 30-second test that tells you, am I lifting heavy enough to matter for my bones?
• 26:23
  Philip Pape: Assuming that we want to be in a high percentage of one rep max, which as I've stated, is somewhat supported by the evidence, but be careful not to overweight it.
• 26:33
  Philip Pape: So pick your main lift.
• 26:35
  Philip Pape: Take the weight that you normally use and do one set and stop about two reps shy of failure and count how many reps you did.
• 26:46
  Philip Pape: If you did more than 12 reps, you are below 70% of your max.
• 26:51
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 26:51
  Philip Pape: So if you're two reps shy of failure and you've done more than 12 reps, you're probably less than 70% of your max.
• 26:58
  Philip Pape: If you're around eight to 12, you're like 70 to 80%, which is kind of the range we're going for.
• 27:03
  Philip Pape: And five to eight reps puts you around 85%.
• 27:06
  Philip Pape: So that's why I like the four to six range.
• 27:09
  Philip Pape: And that's probably why the eight to 12 range is so common as well.
• 27:12
  Philip Pape: Maybe.
• 27:13
  Philip Pape: I don't know.
• 27:13
  Philip Pape: There's a whole history with bodybuilding and everything regarding that.
• 27:16
  Philip Pape: It's just an estimate and it varies person to person.
• 27:19
  Philip Pape: But, you know, if you if you could do 15 reps, you're probably not training heavy.
• 27:24
  Philip Pape: That's my point.
• 27:25
  Philip Pape: So you can figure this out.
• 27:26
  Philip Pape: You can use our calculator also to help you figure out and get after it.
• 27:30
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 27:33
  Philip Pape: And remember, your bones don't require you to go all out with the heaviest load every time in the gym.
• 27:39
  Philip Pape: You just have to be consistent, train hard, have a good mix of rep ranges and loads, stay on your feet, move around, stay active, and you'll be good.
• 27:46
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.