Our skeleton keeps changing throughout our life. From an early age to the later stages of our lives, it needs different care and maintenance. You can often hear older people say that it’s in our thirties that we make the foundations for our life in the fifties and forties.
Still, young people usually don’t pay too much attention to their health at those stages. Negligence of healthy routines can result in severe health issues. The skeletal system, as the pillar of our body, is under a lot of stress in case we lead an unhealthy life. In the next few articles, you can read more about some practical habits that will make your skeleton a more durable system.
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Do slow-paced physical activity
Bones and muscles are closely related because they lean on each other. This means that exercises that strengthen your muscles also improve the condition of your bones.
Still, there’s another important feature that every slow-paced activity needs to contain – weight. For instance, swimming and cycling are less efficient activities for your bones than jogging, running or walking. Physical activity is more beneficial for your bones if it’s performed against gravity. Such exercises add to the volume and flexibility of the skeletal system.
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Introduce occasional intensive exercise
Bones and muscles need occasional intensive workout. This includes going to the gym once or twice a week or doing some more intensive exercises at home. For instance, you can do some basic exercises, like lunges and squats for leg bones. Also, doing pull-ups and push-ups will benefit the lower back and the bones or the torso.
Office workers who sit long hours every day can do 5-minute low-back exercises every day.
As you can see, all these exercises include the weight of your body. This will enable you to activate various bone regions and keep the entire skeleton in good shape.
3) Prepare food rich with calcium
Proper calcium intake is one of the prerequisites for a durable and resistant skeletal system. An average adult person should consume about 1,000 mg daily and elderly people closer to 1,200 mg of calcium per day.
It’s not necessary to drink gallons of milk or yogurt every morning to reach this recommended intake. Two glasses of yogurt per day will get you close to that amount.
Still, many adults don’t drink milk due to intolerance to lactose. Others lost the habit of drinking yogurt.
if you belong to this group of people, increase the intake of chia and sesame seeds, as well as sunflower seeds.
Also, legumes, lentils, and almonds are rich with calcium so add these ingredients to your menu.
With the addition of various types of cottage cheese and hard cheese, you should consume enough calcium to keep your bones healthy.
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Avoid weight amplitudes
Neither getting overweight nor losing too much weight due to diets is good for your bones. Our body prefers harmony. If you torture it with sudden changes, weight-wise, it will experience a certain type of shock. It’s during this disbalance that various health issues can arise.
We’ve already mentioned the importance of regular calcium intake for your bones. Consuming food that will provide you with vitamin D, such as fish, eggs, and other ingredients rich with vitamin D will help you keep your body mass stabile.
Also, as you’re entering the middle-aged period of your life, reduce the intake of saturated fats and red meat. Avoid eating meat every day and try not to eat red meat more than twice a week. Eliminating simple carbohydrates in favor of the complex ones is also an important change for a steady weight.
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Quit smoking, reduce alcohol
When we’re young, we like to live our lives to the full.
This is the zeitgeist of twenty-somethings in most modern cultures. A similar lifestyle continues in the thirties, although starting a family or pursuing a career forces us to calm down.
The beginning of the forties is the moment when you should start thinking about changing your lifestyle. This is also the moment when many people stop for a while to ask themselves the following: when does ageing start and how to get ready for it?
The skeletal system, just like any other internal system in our body, shouldn’t be exposed to alcohol and cigarettes for too long. The perfect option would be not to intoxicate your muscles and bones in the first place. Still, if you’ve developed any of these two habits, try to quit it as soon as possible. The dawn of your middle-aged period is already the red zone in terms of quitting smoking and drinking.
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Abandon a sedentary lifestyle
Modern people in their forties and fifties usually do sedentary jobs. This leads to a lifestyle that doesn’t include too much walking or moving in general. The itinerary of our daily life is getting from the office chair onto our sofa.
If you want to keep your bones fresh and mitigate the effects of ageing, move as much as possible. In addition to the exercise we’ve discussed, walk to your office if possible, go shopping on foot or by bike, and spend weekends outside. This includes joining a trekking group or any other similar group of people who spend weekends in nature.
The less you sit, the more energy you give to your bones. The more energy they have, the longer they stay healthy and fresh.
Conclusion
If you want to properly maintain a building, you need to fix and update its construction properly. The same goes for our bodies.
You will retain a high quality of life if you take care of your skeletal system. Eating various foods and doing different physical activities will help you achieve that goal. Together with healthy living habits and an active lifestyle, you’ll fuel your skeleton with enough energy and inputs to stay fit for a long time.
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AuthorBio: Anne Harris is an HR specialist working for londonlive-incare.com. She eagerly shares her knowledge with her audience on various blogs. When she isn’t writing or attending wellness conferences, she likes to pack her rucksack and ride her day away on her bike or spend time with her friends.
