Earlier today, a woman I train had come across a video from Peter Attia, an expert in longevity and advocate for weight training for people who have more life experience…so they can continue to experience quality of life.

In the video he was discussing that not only could weight training slow down the loss of bone,  but can even sometimes reverse it.  I already knew this because one of my personal training clients had shown me her bone density numbers before training with me and during training and there was a substantial positive increase.

Why?  Well it’s relatively simple.  When you weight train, your body adapts to the stimulus by making things stronger in anticipation of the stimulus happening again.  This comes in the form of the myelin sheathe that incases the neural signal which tells which motor units to fire which muscle fibers, thickening muscle fibers, thickening tendons and thickening bone via remodeling.  All of that complicated sounding mumbo jumbo can be summed up as “gains bro”.

Without that stimulus, the body has no reason to keep it around.

“Wolff’s Law states that bones adapt to the degree of mechanical loading, such that an increase in loading causes the architecture of the internal, spongy bone to strengthen, followed by the strengthening of the cortical layer. Furthermore, a decrease in stress on the bone causes these bone layers to weaken.”

In other words, use it or lose it.

One of the exercises that has come into popularity lately due to the efforts of Bret Contreras is the hip thrust.

Now normally, this exercise is used by people that want to have a nicer booty, and yeah it’s a goto when a woman comes to me and wants to look better in a bikini.  But its something I also recommend for my more life experienced clients who have no desire to post booty pics on the instagram.

First, glutes are the fountain of youth.  In some of the research conducted by Robin Mckenzie, he discovered that as people age, certain muscles get tight, and certain muscles get loose.  The ones that get loose need to be strengthened and they tend to be the ones involved with keeping people upright, which is why being hunched over is associated with age.  Glutes are part of what extend the body, and also prevent back pain, make it easier to get in and out of a chair and continue to live life on your own terms.

But fairly unique to the hip thrust is where the barbell is actually positioned on your thigh.  Now in gymnasts they found that the bones around the ribs tend to be extra strong, right where the parallel bar hits.  The bone remodeled the specific area in anticipation of it happening again.  With the hip thrust that region is your thigh bone, which also happens to be one of the sites where they test for bone density.

We’ve all heard of someone falling and breaking a hip.  Doesn’t it make sense to strengthen the hip?

Now of course, you’d want all of you to be strong, not just for the bone health but in order to live the basic demands of life.  Very few of us will be completing an Ironman at 80 years old (a phenomenal accomplishment by Mountain Lakes local Natalie Grabow).  Most things like picking up your grandkids, carrying groceries, your entire skeletal frame etc. can all benefit from a customized to you progressive strength program.  And if you think you’re too old, you’re not…unless you’re a ghost.

One of my clients who came to me in her late 70’s is bench pressing nearly double her starting max, as a submaximal weight.  You can still make gains with the right program in place.

Now if all of this stuff is “spooky” to you (I had to, tomorrow is Halloween), don’t worry, I got this.  The complicated part I’ll handle, all you have to do is start the free trial at my personal training studio conveniently located on Main Street in Boonton.  Simply send me a text at 973 476 5328 and introduce yourself to get started.

Eric Moss is a personal trainer in Boonton and moonlights as a world-record-holding modern-day professional performing strongman, author, and motivational speaker. In the tradition of the strength performers more common during the turn of the century, he performs feats of strength such as bending steel and breaking chains as part of a live show and travels across the country doing presentations on goal achievement for conferences, corporations, associations, nonprofits, and government entities as well as for schools and universities. His personal training studio is located on Main Street in Boonton New Jersey and is close to Mountain Lakes, Denville, Montville, Kinnelon, Pine Brook, Butler, and Parsippany New Jersey.