06/08/2026
Let’s join the dots on bone health.
Bone health comes at you from every direction at once, doesn’t it. A podcast says it’s all about calcium. An advert reckons it’s collagen. Your GP says be careful with heavy weights, maybe try something a bit gentler. And you’re left holding four half-answers and no real idea what any of it means for a Tuesday evening.
So we’re not going to add to that pile. We just want to join the dots.
Here’s the bit nobody explains properly: your bones are living tissue. They’re being broken down and rebuilt constantly, and they work out how much to rebuild based on what you ask of them. Load a bone and it gets the message that it needs to be stronger than this.
Leave it alone and it quietly makes do with less.
Estrogen was doing a lot of that protecting for you in the background. When levels shift, the rebuilding side slows down. Nothing you did caused that, and it isn’t the end of the story either, because bone still responds to being loaded. It just needs a clearer signal now than it used to.
Calcium and vitamin D are the raw materials, and protein is what your body actually builds with. But materials only get used if something’s asking for them. That’s the job the strength training is doing.
In here, it looks far less dramatic than you’d imagine. It’s a squat that was 20kg in March and is 32.5 now.
It’s your logbook telling you it’s working on the weeks your head is telling you it isn’t.
Something practical to take away:
Keep adding a little over time. Same weights forever means the same signal forever.
Get protein into every meal rather than saving it all for dinner.
Vitamin D through the darker months (10 micrograms a day, NHS guidance).
And if osteoporosis runs in your family, that’s a conversation worth having with your GP. Tell us too, so we can build it into your programming.
None of this is about becoming a powerlifter. It’s about feeling good in the body you’re in this week, and still doing the things you love in thirty years’ time. Same training, both jobs.
