Professor Belinda Beck

But the kinds of exercise they were testing were not showing any great efficacy.

So they weren't showing that they were able to, none of them were really showing that they could grow decent amounts of bone.

The typical recommended kind of exercise that your doctor would say, you know, I would just go do some walking, maybe some swimming and cycling because obviously you're very frail and you might fracture.

So you better do these gentle exercises, Tai Chi and those sorts of things.

Those will positively not even stop bone loss.

It's better than doing nothing.

And I really want to emphasize that.

And when people say to me, well, so I shouldn't walk.

No, that's not the message because all of those other forms of exercise are so good for all the other tissues in your body.

But if you're trying to grow bone, you need to load the bones more.

and those are not sufficiently high intensity.

So the idea with Lift More was to say, well, if those exercises aren't intense enough, maybe we need to try a higher intensity exercise.

And if the concern about this is that we might cause fracture, then we have to do this very carefully and we'll make sure we've supervised it.

We'll

load people up gradually from a very low level to a high level, and we'll track them to try and prevent injury.

And that's what the Lift More study was.

There's a whole bunch of reasons why people were surprised with the findings.

And probably the primary one was that everyone had just decided that exercise didn't work for bone because everybody had tried all these other ones and that didn't work.

And then, of course, secondarily was, well, if you did it and they were really surprised that you didn't hurt anyone because it's ridiculous.

People with very frail bones and you're making them lift and do impact.