Professor Belinda Beck

and the need for the muscles to contract strongly to move you through the air, your bones will resolve and you'll actually get rid of a lot of bone.

And we can create a bit of a model of microgravity by putting people in bed rest.

That's also unloading the skeleton and so bone will resolve.

Putting a cast on your arm will make the muscles not use that as much.

And so you will actually lose bone in that immobilized limb, spinal cord injury, unloading the parts of the body that are no longer weight-bearing and so on.

So bone is extremely responsive to load.

But in the main, we have a genetic blueprint that tells our body, our skeleton, to grow to a certain size.

If we underload it, you probably won't grow as much as you possibly could.

And if you overload it, you might grow a little bit more.

And so this is the principle of overload and how we can harness that to improve our bone mass and health throughout life.

At any time of life, the principle applies.

If you unload, you'll lose bone.

If you overload, you'll grow bone.

And that can still be applied in old age.

Yeah, sure.

So it's sort of along the same lines as what I was just talking about, loading and unloading.

If you remain as physically active throughout young adulthood as you were, you know, when you gained your peak bone mass, you should hang on to most of that bone.

You know, it...

that is helping you to hold on to that bone.

But typically, people are not as active as they're older as they were when they were younger.