The Importance of Bone Mass
Why is bone mass important and how health-tech plays a part.
Searches for the “best fitness trackers of 2021” are #3 on the Google trends list and for various reasons. There is a very good reason for that. Mainly people want to stay connected plus they want to have some awareness to how much they move, how they are sleeping and how many calories they are burning for the most part.
I wanted to purchase one after including them as a helpful tool during the transformation contests. I was also struggling with the quality and the amount of sleep I was getting. Later I noticed other important personal data points like bone and muscle mass.
Since I am now 50, let me just pause for a moment as I read what I just wrote . . . . it is crazy isn’t it? Time flies wow! I have so much more to write but lets stay on point.
So aging and losing bone and muscle mass go hand in hand. If you are not working on supporting the “continuous” growth or retention of your muscle and the density of your bones, you WILL lose it. The process is called Osteopenia (bone loss). Go ahead and add Sarcopenia (muscle loss) since we are talking about processes that will happen naturally unless you actually do something to change or delay them. Both together lead to frailty, falls, injuries and basically not a great physical shape to be.
Both processes hit women sooner and faster than men because we go through a huge hormonal change relatively early in life which quickly aids the loss of bone and muscle but that doesn’t mean men do not also lose both. The processes seem to start about a decade later.
Why is Bone Mass Important.
Bone mass in important in many ways. Bones “provide structure, protect organs, anchor muscles and store calcium”. (source)
“Bone mass and strength achieved at the end of the growth period, simply designated as ‘Peak Bone Mass (PBM)’, plays an essential role in the risk of osteoporotic fractures occurring in adulthood. It is considered that an increase of PBM by one standard deviation would reduce the fracture risk by 50%.”.(source)
In the first picture below, you see my Withings scale data for 9/25/21.
My bone mass looks pretty good. I am in the normal range according to my Withings Body+ scale:
| Women | Men |
| 2,5% – 4% | 3% – 5% |
I am still interested in increasing my bone mass percentage .1 or more if possible. I would also like to increase my muscle mass to 65-70% which means fat mass will decrease as long as my nutrition does not go way off point.
So what does all that mean.
Thanks to my Withings fitness watch, I have been able to fix my quality of sleep and gave me some health goals I did not have previously. ALSO I need to increase my weight training. I have been doing too much yoga lately lol. Although I did “feel” instability in my body already yet the watch puts this information into a chart and a way to track all the information easier.
Already since the measurement above, I have increased my muscle mass to 64.1% yet bone mass is the same. Bone mass is not an overnight process and I am okay with that.
What is the takeaway
We all need to put in the work in order to keep the body working optimally, functioning optimally and continually improving OR retaining quality of life.
ALL of this work is a daily practice of training smart with the right kind of exercise (weight training), including nutrition (changing daily eating habits) and flexibility (yoga) as well.
Always make sure you are balanced in all of your health and fitness programming. Otherwise you could be pushing too far in the wrong direction leading to instability. Aka too much yoga and not enough weight training.
So show up every day for your health, doing what is smart for your body and your mind and having a personal assistant health and fitness system (fitness watch, blood pressure monitor and scale) are all very helpful to collect and chart your health data.
Thank you for reading!
Coach Tanya
