Get Moving Now! - To Prevent Osteoporosis After Menopause

During the transition to menopause your most immediate concern is in finding ways to relieve the discomfort of the symptoms you're experiencing right now, such as hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings, sleeplessness and fatigue.

Understandable. However, you should be aware that there is a "silent disease" that you could already have or be at risk of developing, without even knowing.

It's called Osteoporosis.

Osteoporosis means "porous bone" and it's a disease of the bones which causes a loss in bone density and mass, leaving the bone weak and subject to fractures. You can't feel your bones getting weaker, so quite often it takes a break to realize that you have osteoporosis.

Throughout your childhood and young adulthood, your bones are constantly being removed and rebuilt; old bone is being replaced by new bone. After the age of 30, bone loss starts to outpace bone formation. After menopause, bone loss speeds up even more due to the decline in estrogen levels in your body; in fact post menopausal women can lose up to 2% of their bone mass annually.

Osteoporosis affects over 200 million people worldwide. It's estimated that more than 10 million Americans, both men and women, have osteoporosis and 34 million more are at high risk of developing it. A staggering 50% of all women and 25% of men will suffer bone fractures related to osteoporosis at some time in their life.

Steps You Can Take Now To Prevent Osteoporosis

Although you can't control certain risk factors for developing osteoporosis like a family history of the disease, a lifetime of non-exercise, a lifelong low-calcium diet or a low body weight/height ratio, it's not too late to incorporate some changes into your lifestyle that will help to strengthen your bones and decrease your risk of fractures.

Recent studies have shown that the risk of osteoporosis is reduced in people who are active, and health experts are recommending the following 3 specific types of exercise that you can do to build bone mass and prevent osteoporosis.

Yoga Helps Menopause: You Don't Have To Be Bendy To Benefit

If you're going through menopause, it won't surprise you to learn that your fluctuating hormones are the number one cause of those troublesome symptoms like hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings, insomnia and depression.

As the estrogen and progesterone levels in your body decline during the menopause transition, you may be left with a general feeling of emotional and physical imbalance even if your menopause symptoms are not that severe.

Yoga can help you to correct this instability by bringing your body and your mind back into balance. Yoga postures and poses (asanas) combined with breathing exercises (pranayama) help to strengthen the muscles and internal organs of the body as well as balance the endocrine system; the system of glands such as hypothalamus, pituitary, thyroid and pineal, responsible for secreting hormones directly into the bloodstream.

Inverted postures such as the shoulder stand, downward facing dog and plough pose work the heart and boost the immune system and are considered to be hormonal balancers due to the increased blood supply to the endocrine glands at the throat during practice.

Yoga meditation and relaxation practices enable you to let go of tension in your body and your mind, allowing access to a deep inner peace and calm, helping you to accept yourself and your body and leading to a calmer, easier transition to menopause.

Who Can Do Yoga?

If you've never considered practicing yoga to help ease your menopause symptoms then at this point your mind is probably throwing out all kinds of objections like "yoga is for young people", "I'm not flexible enough to do yoga" or "I don't have time to do a yoga class"

First of all, just about anyone can practice yoga. The oldest yoga teacher in the world is 93 years old! All right, she started practicing yoga when she was eight years old but the average age of the students in her daily yoga class is 40 plus. You can start practicing yoga at any age, you just have to listen to your body and not over extend yourself during the exercises. Choose a reputed teacher and a class designed for older students so you won't be tempted to overdo it when you're just starting out.