Weight-Bearing Exercise

 

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Wait…what’s a weight bearing exercise? It’s activities that involve moving your body weight against gravity while staying upright. Hunh?

Think stair climbing. Think jogging. Think tennis, racquetball, and volleyball. Pushups, jumping, golf, basketball, walking, lunges, squats, aerobics. 

 

Weight Bearing Exercises are extremely important for good health! That’s because it maintains and improves your musculoskeletal health. What the heck does that mean?

First, your musculoskeletal health refers to the human body’s system of bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, and cartilage. You want all of those to be strong and healthy.

 

 Weight bearing exercises help this system by:

• Increasing Bone Density: Aerobic exercises (including Water Aerobics) puts stress on your bones. This stress stimulates bone-growing health, which increases bone density.
• Increasing Bone Strength: Regular weight-bearing activities make bones stronger and more resilient. Stronger bones can better withstand impacts and everyday stresses.

Weight-bearing exercises also help build and maintain muscle mass. Strong muscles protect your bones and joints. Here’s a kicker: While muscle mass tends to retreat as we get older, weight bearing exercises counteract this decline. That’s like, HUGE.

 

Other benefits of weight bearing exercise?

 

Keeping your joints healthy by strengthening the muscles surrounding them provides better support and stability. This helps prevent falls and is especially true for major joints like your hips and knees, which bear most of your body weight.

 

We hear a lot about gaining weight as we get older due to our “metabolism slowing down.” Want faster metabolism? Weight bearing exercise burns calories and builds muscle, helping you maintain a healthy weight. Since muscle tissue burns more calories at rest than fat tissue, this boosts your metabolism.

 

Are you sold on Weight Bearing Exercises yet? I hope so. 

 

Now, how do we perform Weight bearing exercises in the water? I’m glad you asked. First of all, swimming doesn’t cut it. While swimming is an excellent overall exercise, you’re not bearing any weight at all while you’re doing it. So, it’s not a weight bearing exercise.

I personally discovered an exercise in the water that is weight bearing. I had listened to doctors talk about weight bearing exercise for years, and I thought the only way to reach the goal was with on-land exercises like running, lifting, pumping, etc. Guess what?

You can do all of these in the water! Yep, and they are load bearing. Unlike swimming, when you run in chest-high water you’re still carrying 20% of your weight. So if you run back and forth for a while – ta da! 

Also, exercises with buoys (water dumbbells) provide the lifting, as long as you’re getting your resistance by placing the buoys under the water. Remember, buoy exercises out of the water are for endurance, buoy exercises under the water are for resistance.

 

How about sports? Well, there is water basketball, water volleyball (my personal favorite), and water polo, to name a few.

If you’ve never tried any of these games in the water, jump right in, they are so much fun! They also have a built-in benefit: if you fall, you’re only going to hit water. In my experience, that makes me a lot braver. I can go for a ball, fling my body half-way across the court for a shot, and run to my heart’s content, knowing all the while that there is very little chance of me getting hurt.

 

I have a small caveat. Playing sports in a pool means boundaries defined by… walls. Usually concrete walls. It’s to your advantage to stay in bounds of the court rather than hit the wall. You hit the wall, you bleed or break something, game over.

 

A personal story: My internal medicine doctor has said for years that my water fitness exercises are great for me and to keep doing what I’m doing. But, for the same several years, my gynecologist wanted me to do “weight bearing exercises.” She did not understand how water aerobics can be weight-bearing. It took a while, but the proof is in the pudding. She finally told me three years ago, “I don’t know what you’re doing in the water, but you’ve got great abs, great pecs, you’re doing fine. Keep on doing what you’re doing.”

 

I love it when doctors agree!

 

Get in some weight-bearing exercise. Do the right thing for your bones, your joints, tendons, ligaments, muscles, and mind.

 

And I’ll see ya’ in the water!

 

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