About a week ago, I was working in my personal training studio with one of my clients. I sometimes joke around telling people she’s a cyborg because at the young age of late 50’s early 60’s I had coached her to doing a pull up with 56lbs hanging from her waist. She was telling me a friend of hers who is extremely active was told by her doctor she has osteoporosis so no heavy lifting.

That particular phrase drives me nuts. What is heavy anyway? What constitutes as heavy is going to be relative to the individual AND relative to the lift itself. As an example, a 53lb deadlift is not an extremely impressive lift. Holding a 53lb kettlebell iron crucifix style is way harder. And what’s heavy for you may not be heavy for me. It’s all relative.

And also when they screen for bone density, they compare it to when bone density peaks in their 30’s. They don’t compare you to the rest of the population unless I’m mistaken. Like I said, it’s all relative.

Consequently, I’m also networked with other personal trainers on social media, and literally later that same day someone posted a similar story. Only their client had improved their bone density and yet their doctor told them not to lift anything over 10lbs.

That is fine to start, but never anything over 10lbs ever? That’s a recipe for disaster.

Before I include an exercise with someone’s personal training program, I like to ask myself “Where do we go from here?” As in, how can I use it to progress someone towards their goals? It’s sort of like the idea of the fixed state mindset and the growth based mindset. I don’t want to include things that don’t allow for growth.

And what do I mean by growth? Well, when you train appropriately, your muscles grow, your bones grow ie thicken, the myelin sheathe that encases that transmissions of neural flow to activate your motor units also grow (sorry to get a bit geeky, but I like to throw things like that in there to let people know I’m not just a pretty face). That growth makes you harder to kill.

So yeah, no heavy lifting relative to the individual to start with but avoiding it forever is only going to make bone density worse. Like anything, start within your capabilities and progress them from there. Every single woman who has sought me out to offset the weakening of their bones has made remarkable progress relative to where they started from…no bones about it.

If you need help training, I offer a free trial at my personal training studio on Main Street in Boonton. Just text me at 973 476 5328 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, Butler, and Parsippany New Jersey.