You can train 4 times a week, feel like you’re working hard, sweat dripping. But your bones may not be noticing much signal to adapt to.
I see and hear this regularly. Especially when a woman is doing way more exercise then the rest of the women her age, she feels there is nowhere left to add any more exercise. When I start explaining what type of exercise and how it needs to be done, they realise that although they’re keeping their heart, lungs and muscles extremely fit their bones have stopped adapting long ago.
In my recent piece I discussed why bone adapts to short, hard, novel signals and then quickly desensitises to increased volume. In the LIFTMOR trial, postmenopausal women with low bone density completed 2 sessions a week of heavy weight training completing 5 sets of 5 repetitions per exercise.
The group completing the heavy lifting gained 2.9% spine density while the light exercise group continued to lose bone density. The dose is fairly small compared to what some women tell me they do, whilst still losing bone density. This means that most training plans aren’t failing on effort, but on the type of signal they’re sending.
Let’s audit your training plan. Not by feel. Against the 9 crucial things that drive bone formation. Score each out of 3 and you’ll know where your training is bone stimulating or where it’s just making you tired.
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1. Magnitude: how hard is the load?
Bone responds to strain, and strain scales with how heavy the load is relative to what you can lift. Light weights you could do all day barely register. The osteogenic zone is heavy work. Sets in the region of 75–85%+ of your one-rep max, or an honest RPE of 8–9 where the last rep is a real effort.
Score
0: nothing in the week is hard.
1: moderate machine work.
2: some heavy sets.
3: regular, properly heavy loading.
2. Strain rate: how fast does the load come on?
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