Professor Belinda Beck

Yeah, as many people do, I got into the area because I had sore shins when I ran.

And so...

That got me thinking, you know, as a very young athlete, what's going on?

This doesn't make any sense.

I'm very healthy and I don't understand why I've got this sore bit on my bones.

So the start of my research career was really into bone stress injuries.

But that morphed into an interest into the effect of exercise on bone in general because in actual fact,

Bone stress injuries tend to look after themselves.

They tend to get better if you just rest them, whereas osteoporosis is something that goes the other way.

You develop it as you age, typically, and once you have it, you need to do something active.

to try and improve the bone mass.

So it's a huge problem.

It is prevalent.

It is expensive.

It's painful.

It really impacts people's quality of life and it shortens people's life and it shortens their health span.

So the number of years where they are happy and healthy.

So it just became an interest just of the public health need.

And, of course, underlying everything that I do is the importance of exercise and the benefit to all our systems.

Yeah, that's right.