After breast cancer treatment, maintaining strong bones becomes critically important. Treatments can take a toll on your skeletal system, increasing the risk of osteoporosis and fractures. Understanding why bone health is vital and how to protect it is key to your overall well-being.
In this episode, we’ll highlight the crucial role that muscle strength plays in maintaining bone health. Our bones and muscles are intricately connected; when we build muscle, we also promote stronger bones. Resistance training isn’t just about getting fit – it’s about building a foundation that supports your entire body, including your bones.
I’ll guide you through the science behind how muscle strength contributes to bone density. We’ll discuss practical, achievable ways to incorporate resistance exercises into your daily routine, regardless of your fitness level. Whether lifting weights, doing bodyweight exercises, or engaging in resistance band workouts, every bit helps maintain and improve bone health.
Join me as we uncover actionable strategies to enhance your bone health through muscle building, empowering you to take charge of your recovery and well-being.
Whether you're currently undergoing treatment or in remission, this episode is packed with valuable information to help you build a strong, resilient future.
Referred to in this episode:
Metabolic Health Coaching with Laura
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Read the full transcript:
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You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach. I'm your host, Laura Lummer. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills and the insights and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis. If you're looking for a way to create a life, that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started.
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Hey, friends, you're listening to Episode 355, of better than before breast cancer. I'm your host, Laura Lummer. And today is our Tuesday terrain talk. You know, a story comes to mind right off the bat. The other day, I posted something on Facebook, I went to a spin class, I had a great class, I got out of that class, I posted a story on Instagram and Facebook, about being the oldest person in the class about making sure that we get up and we get out. And we take care of our bodies, regardless of our age and how we too often, we limit ourselves because of our age, that so many people who are of a certain age and that age depends on you. If you think 40 is too old, if you think 50 is too old, if you think 60 is too old, whatever age you are, if you think you're too old, you feel weird, I'm the oldest person in the group, and then you don't go, you don't go to a class, you don't exercise. you limit yourself in some way. And it has a huge impact on your health. And so I posted this video, and it wasn't just talking about getting out in and and working out and getting exercise and moving your body, but just about overall how we limit ourselves by the belief of our age. And what a gift it is to be whatever age you are, right? What a blessing what a gift, every day that I wake up, and I'm a day older, I'm so grateful for that day. And so why not change our mindset from thinking about what we can't do, because of our age to doing whatever we can do regardless of age. I think even young people limit themselves because they don't yet feel the effects of an aging body. And oftentimes, we'll just be like, Oh, I don't have to worry about it. Because I remember those wonderful years when I could still eat whatever I want and never been an ounce even though I always exercise that I was very consistent with that throughout my life. But I wasn't as consistent or mindful of diet at certain times, probably because I was a to so young and be running around after a bunch of kids while working full time job, and exercising, I could eat more. But things change as we get older. So anyway, I got a lot of comments about that post very positive comments. And I wanted to talk a little more about physical health. I think that the more we know and understand about how our body works, the more interested we can get about that, then the more motivated we might be to do something about it. It's like if you know that your car runs on a certain kinds of gas, you make sure and you put that gas in because you don't want to damage the car. And when you know what happens to your body. I think that we're more apt to do things to support our body. And one of the things that we have a lot of issues with after breast cancer and breast cancer treatments, along with aging and menopause is bone health. And do you realize or have you thought about how much muscle impacts bone health? And I think a lot of people do not realize that we think the bone is a matter of calcium and vitamin D. And we don't realize how much our whole body is so amazing and so perfect. And works with such synergy. Like if you think of a skeleton, this is just a system of levers, right? Like think about all the bones you see in a skeleton. Without muscles, those bones are useless. Right? If those muscles can't move those bones then what good are the bones except that you don't look like a jellyfish and even when it comes to muscles, those muscles can't move unless you've got healthy nerves. And we know and experience some of this as we go through breast cancer treatment if you go through certain chemo therapies and you get neuropathy, right, and that's a damage to the nerves and that can also happen with radiation treatment. And when those nerves are damaged, we don't have as good of a grip. I'm using my fingers like squeezing my hands right now because after I went through chemotherapy in 2011, I had horrible neuropathy in my hands and my feet and partway up my legs. And thank God for acupunct
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because it really absolutely did heal the neuropathy that I was experiencing. But radiation also has a big effect on our muscles. So I want to talk about some important things about muscle, so you can understand what it's actually doing for you. And if you're concerned about bone density, I want you to realize the important role that muscle has when it comes to bone density, but way more than just bone density. So let's talk a little bit about what radiation can do. Because I think many, many, many people who go through breast cancer go through radiation, and I've had radiation on my spine and on both of my hips also. And so especially on the left hip, where I had a lot more radiation that I did on the right hip, and on my thoracic spine in my back, there's a tremendous amount of stiffness there. So I have to be diligent about doing flexibility training. And I definitely have a completely different range of motion in my spine, and in especially my left hip, since going through radiation. But if I'm not really conscious and intentional about minding that muscle, or those muscles and keeping them stronger, and also incorporating flexibility, like Pilates and yoga, then I find myself in a lot of pain and with a lot of stiffness. And I'm going to help you understand why that happens. And hopefully, if you're experiencing it, this will help you to be able to take some action to reduce some of the physical suffering because you do have power over quite a bit of that. So radiation can lead to muscle atrophy, which is shrinking because of the damage that it causes to muscle cells. I know that radiation oncologists are really careful about trying not to expose parts of the body unnecessarily. But whatever parts of the body are getting radiation, and for instance, like in my hips, it had to get to my bone, so it had to go through my muscles. And when we're doing radiation on our chest, or under our arms, or wherever you doing it for breast cancer therapy, that pectoral muscle is definitely getting impacted by this radiation. So the muscles that get affected can experience wasting, which means there's becoming weaker and less functional. It can also form scar tissue radiation and of course surgery, right, I definitely have scar tissue from my upper body surgeries, and then that can make muscles for really stiff and less flexible. And a lot of times, especially right after we've had some kind of a treatment, we're especially careful because it is uncomfortable. And we're afraid if we move too much we're going to injure or hurt ourselves. And so a really important thing to consider is that those muscles have to be moved. And so getting physical therapy after breast cancer treatment after radiation treatment is so important. And it can really help for you to maintain your muscle strength and flexibility. And it can reduce the impact that radiation especially has on muscle tissue. So if you're currently going through radiation treatment, this is an important thing to ask your doctor about, can you get a referral to a physical therapist so that they can keep you moving and physical therapists are just absolutely amazing. I absolutely love physical therapy, I think it's magical. It's so important in keeping your body functional and strong and moving properly. Like I cannot give enough credit to physical therapists. And I highly recommend it. So of course physical therapy important and regular exercise that's really carefully tailored to you. If you've never done exercise before, or you haven't done it on a regular basis, or you've never done strength training or lifting weights, and you've gone through breast cancer and you start thinking wow, I've got to really get in there, I've got to build some muscle your body's starting to age, please, at least for a little while, consult a professional. I'll put a link in the show notes for this episode to the cancer exercise Institute because they've got a list of personal trainers who are specifically trained to understand what people go through in cancer treatment and support them in understanding how to tailor an exercise program to help them and not injure them. And that is important. Now if you're a pro and you know how to exercise and you feel confident you feel good about it and you know how to take it slow and train yourself and not jump in too hard and injure yourself go for it. But if you're not sure or you feel uncomfortable and you want to start exercising, I highly, highly recommend getting a personal trainer at least until they can show you the proper way to do the exercises that are recommended and one that understands the cancer population. Okay, super important. Now nutrition, obviously nutrition
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adequate protein intake is going to support muscle repair and maintenance. And in a minute, I'm going to tell you why that's important and what that has to do with your bone health. So let's jump right into that. When muscles work, they contract, right. So you have a centric, if you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see me moving, if you're listening to this on the podcast, I'm extending my arm that's East centric. And we have concentric, when we do a bicep curl, right, pick up a weight, and we curl it and we contract that muscle. And so when muscles contract, they put what's called mechanical force on your bones, it takes energy, right? If you're lifting something heavy, or you're slowly lowering something heavy, you feel the strain. And that strain is actually very positive, that's a mechanical force. And what happens is, it stimulates your bone cells, particularly bone cells called osteoblasts. And those are cells that are responsible for bone formation. So when we engage in regular physical activity, especially weight bearing and resistance exercises, we increase the mechanical load on our muscle, which increases the mechanical load on our bones. Now, this mechanical load, this force is transferred from the muscle to the bone through a connective tissue called a tendon, right? Tendons connect muscle to bone, Ligaments connect bone to bone. So when we talk about tendon, we got to think about tendons because they're very important as people age, or if we have a sedentary life, we will as we age, like we wake up with bed injuries, right or wake up are like, Oh, my God, I hurt myself, what would you do I was sleeping, I turned the wrong way in bed. But with a sedentary life, and aging. And if you combine the two, or you have one or the other going on, your tendons can really be affected by this. So what happens with age is that the production of collagen in our body decreases. And that leads to change in the structure and the strength of tendons of the tissue that's connecting your bone to your muscle, so that collagen intake is very important. And proper nutrition, especially as we age to make sure eating enough protein super important here. So when these tendons age, they tend to become less elastic, and more prone to stiffness, which is going to make you more prone to injury. So if we think about this tissue, the tissue itself needs to be moved, right. So as we work on strengthening muscles, and we're extending and contracting our muscles, then we're also putting tension on those tendons, and we're extending and contracting. So things like yoga, stretching, I've seen a lot of like, these new stretch labs are opening all around where I live, I don't know, if you have more you live, but stretching, certain kinds of massage therapy, these types of things to move our body around are so good for maintaining the elasticity in our tendons. Because with age, dehydration, which I'll touch on in a second, and sedentary lifestyle, if those tendons aren't constantly expanding and contracting, if we're not maintaining that elasticity in them, then they get tight. And that's when we can really get hurt. And one of those things that lends to the increased stiffness is decreased hydration. So we know that a lot of things that happened to us as we age can be attributed to deep cellular dehydration, like our body is so full of water, we have so much water in our body, we have intracellular water, we have extracellular water, and that extracellular matrix, the fluid that is around ourselves, every cell, a muscle cell, all of our cells in our body, and those become dried out and dehydrated, that's going to lead to more stiffness in those tendons. So hydration is super important. And especially if we're exercising a lot, it's important. So as these tendons start to degenerate, and become stiff, you get an increased risk of tears. And so then people get more afraid, well, I'm afraid to exercise because I've never exercised and I don't want to hurt myself. And I say that is a wise thing to be aware of. And again, use caution, don't not exercise, but get a referral to a physical therapist, or find a personal trainer or I don't know maybe you can find I've never looked on YouTube for personal training videos. So I don't know that there are experts on there, but if there are and you're, you think you can't afford a personal trainer even for a little bit of time, then maybe find some really reputable so
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Horses online that can help you out. But I really would highly recommend in person for whatever amount of time you can afford to do that, especially if you're older and have lived a sedentary life and have been through some kind of medical crisis. So as we age, of course, we have this wear and tear, right? I mean, I'm 60 years old, there's been 60 years of wear and tear on this body, on these tendons and on these muscles. But this use a sedentary life can have some of the same effects that aging, right? a sedentary life will also contribute to atrophy of your tendons, the shrinking of the tendons, because we're not using them regularly. And when we go through cancer treatment, if we're feeling really sick, again, we have long periods of sedentary times, maybe we didn't have as much before that, but we're really tired, and so we're resting. But if you had an overall sedentary life even before that, then it can really contribute to this shrinking of your tendons and weakening that structure. So again, with our body, when we don't use something, our body is so smart, so intelligent, and it reroutes energy is it's really designed to conserve energy. So the old saying use it or lose it is true, use your muscles, or lose a lot of the strength, and a lot of the elasticity, and even the flow of blood. So when we don't have physical activity, when we are not moving when we are not expanding and contracting muscle, and moving lymphatic fluid through our body and moving blood through our body, we can experience a reduced blood flow to our tendons. And we can also harm or impair that nutrient delivery. So it can make it harder for tendons to heal. And since tendons don't have a lot of elasticity, if they get injured, it can take them a long time to heal. So we want to make sure that we're staying physically active, not just to say strong, but so all of these functions work better in our body, and that we're in less pain and discomfort. And too often, we write that off as just I'm getting older and stiff. And it doesn't have to be like that. So we can really have a big impact on the amount of discomfort that we experience in our joints by moving. And by keeping strong muscles. Another thing that happens as people age if we have a sedentary lifestyle, and we're not doing regular resistance training, is not only as these muscles and tendons get weaker, do our bones get weaker, but we also start to have an impact on our balance and coordination. So strong muscles improve balance and coordination. They reduce your risk of falling. And you may not think that by here's why. muscle strength is super important, because core strength, your abdominals, your bag, your pelvic muscles, that's like our center of gravity. And that's what provides stability to the body. And that core stability is essential for balance, then let's think about hip and leg strength. All right, so we got core strength is giving us that stability. It's because stabilizing everything. And then we got these limbs flopping around, well, what is our core balancing on but our hips and our legs. And so when we don't have good strong stability in the hips and the legs, and we don't have good core strength, think about what the muscles in your core supporting your spine, right your ability to breathe and move. And so when we don't have that stability, we tend to wobble, we lose our balance, and we fall. And as people age, one of the things that leads straight to death are false. Now, it's an interesting thing, because when we don't have good muscle strength when we're not in a regular habit of having physical activity and physical exercise, we lose what's called proprioception this is really interesting. Proprioception is kind of your body's ability to know where it's at in space and time. And so when we don't have good proprioception, we trip over things. So here if we don't have good balance, because we don't have good core strength, then we have much more tendency to fall. And if we don't have good proprioception, we tend to bump into things hit things, or trip on things. But in addition to that, is your ankle flexibility. So think about the tendons again, think about the ligaments and the tendons and the things that attach the bones and the muscle to each other. When they
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Those get stiff and tight, we ended up doing something. And I know you've seen this in older people called the senior shuffle, where they're literally don't pick up their feet anymore. So when we have regular physical activity, and strong muscles, we're not only contributing to the strength of our bones and our bone density, but we're providing an overall safer environment for our body to function. Right now, when it comes to bones, and it's not only the mechanical force, that muscles give to those bones when we're using our muscles, that's important, but muscles actually help regulate the supply of nutrition to your bones. So because muscle contraction improves blood circulation, think about what carries nutrition through your body. It's blood, your blood cells carry nutrition and oxygen. So when we use our muscles, and we put tension on those bones, we improve our blood circulation. And that improves the delivery of nutrients to our bones, nutrients and oxygen for maintaining good bone health and strength. Because oxygen is transported on your red blood cells, we want to move that oxygen through our body to all of those tissues. Also, when we have regular muscle activity, mere global contraction and expansion of these muscles, we're not only improving our circulation, applying mechanical force to the bones to improve our bone density. But muscle activity actually reduces the rate of bone resorption, which is the process by which bone is broken down. So this helps in maintaining a healthy balance between the osteoblasts that I talked about in the beginning that are building bone or forming bone and the osteo class, which are breaking bone down. And so when we improve that balance, and we keep a healthier balance, and we're making it faster than we're breaking it down, and we're keeping that good bone density, and using your muscles regularly is a big factor in that. And another way in which using your muscles helps to support bone health is by the hormonal influence. So muscle contractions during exercise, stimulate the release of hormones of growth factors that promote bone growth and bone remodeling exercise is known to increase the production of growth hormone and testosterone, both of which have really positive effects on bone density. So to summarize everything, if we have a combination of muscle loss, due to medical conditions and treatments, aging in a sedentary lifestyle, is significantly undermines bone health. A reduces that mechanical stress and mechanical load, it impairs your balance, it can alter your hormone profiles, it decreases nutrients supplied to the bones, and it increases bone resorption. So regular physical activity that includes weight bearing exercise is crucial to mitigate these effects and to maintain good muscle and bone health. So now I'm gonna gonna address some common objections, because I know you're already thinking them.
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I hate lifting weights. It's boring. Oh, I don't know how, oh, I don't want to go to the gym. Oh, it's too expensive. All these things. And you know, I just kind of said the mockingly sorry about that. But they're just your brain throwing out excuses. Because your brain wants to conserve energy. Your brain is like, I don't want to get up and go work hard and sweat and then be sore. But the investment of time and money into maintaining a healthy body and supporting your physical activity is worth every penny. When I stop and think about the amount of money people spend on medications, and therapies or the amount of quality of life they lose from not having good physical health. There's no price tag you could put on that, like however you have to rearrange your budget to take care of your body first, it is worth it. And if that's 100% not possible for you, guess what? You can move your body for free. You can do weight bearing exercise with no weights, just your body because your body is a weight. How much does your body weigh? Well, whatever amount it weighs, if you're pushing it up and down with your legs through squats, and lunges, and push ups and sit ups, all of these things that you can do simply with your body. You are going to get some weight bearing resistance and especially if you've had a sedentary life, or you're a little older or we've had a sedentary period of time because of cancer and cancer treatment. So I know for a fact that there
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Got lots of apps and videos and YouTubes, and all of that kind of stuff that you can access for free, that are specific to bodyweight exercises. And so if you feel intimidated by strength training, or lifting or walking through the gym going, what are all these crazy machines about, then start with just using your body and the resistance of your body. Because it's powerful. Even in yoga, if you think about the amount of strength you see, when a yoga teacher is doing a handstand, or, you know, even down there's certain poses where it's kind of a plank, and then from that plank, just with core strength, lifting their hips up and bringing their knees up to their elbows, I mean, that's an incredible strength. And that's just done with bodyweight. So you can develop a lot of muscle using the weight of your body. Okay, I think it's an important thing to know, Are you a person who will exercise at home, because if you're not, then don't go out and buy weight equipment for home. Like, be honest with yourself. If it's true that you know, I will not exercise at home because I will get distracted. I'll think about the laundry, I'll think about my favorite show that's on whatever's going or there's kids in the house, whatever it is, that's going to distract you and you know, for sure, if there's a homeless not gonna happen, then be honest with yourself, and know that you got to get a workout buddy to get you outside, or you've got to join a gym, you've got to figure out a way to get out of the house. Now, when my kids were younger, I couldn't go to the gym, and I really love going to the gym. And so I just had to commit to time and it was after they went to bed. At that time, p90x was all the rage. And I would do p90x Or there was I think insanity workouts, there was all kinds of different workouts that I could do. And I did them at home after the kids went to bed. Because it was the only time I can fit it in, you know, was working and raising a family. So you've got to really look at your life, and understand how exercise is going to fit into it. And if you have an exercise or you don't exercise regularly, please don't start by saying okay, every day, I'm going to exercise for an hour. That's a good way to hurt yourself. It is a fantastic way to get sick of exercise and hang it up again for the next 20 years. Right? If you've never exercised or you haven't in a long time, are you recovering from something, there's a reason why we call it Training, and why a body can be trained, take it slow, look at where you can do three times a week for 20 minutes, or 15 minutes. And then once you get good at that, and you find a routine and you're like, Okay, I've got it on Saturday and Sunday and Wednesday, I can do that. Figure out a way that it's really and truly going to fit with your life because that's the only way that exercise will be a consistent long term sustainable factor, and especially strength training. So the recommendation for strength training is at least two days a week, full body, right. So workout your whole body with some resistance, at least twice a week. So we can start there. That's easy, right? Start there with 10 Push ups, 10 squats, 10 sit ups. And for some of you listening, that's gonna be really hard. And that is okay. Right? Because you're gonna feel so proud of yourself if you start off and that's hard. And then you find yourself doing 20 of one of those amazing, and you're gonna see and you're gonna prove to yourself that your body responds, and that your body trains no matter what age you are, it does not matter how old you are, your body will respond to training. So know what's reasonable for you start off slowly. There's an exercise device that I love that's called the TRX if you want to exercise at home, and you can use a TRX you can, they have a little thing that you can attach to them, like throw it over your door jamb and close the door. So you can use a TRX pretty much anywhere inside of your house as long as you have a door in your house somewhere. And it's amazing because you use your body as the resistance when you're using a TRX and I'll link to TRX. I've been a certified instructor with them for so many years on different levels. And I love learning about TRX and where the training and now you see TRX in gyms you see TRX and yoga studios is a really valuable device. I'm not I haven't purchased one in a long time I have two of them. And at the time, I think baby there are a couple of $100 but they're worth it and you can use them anywhere. And I take my TRX when I travel because you can use it in a hotel room. So if you don't like going down to the hotel gyms, you throw your TRX up over that door jamb. And it's amazing how much you can do and they've got lots of videos on different things you can do. TRX is actually a really useful device to for improving flexibility and opening the body. It was something that I use a lot to help
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To stretch, especially my upper body when I was recovering from surgeries and treatment, so yoga, wonderful because it's a stress reduction. But it's also something to open those bodies and keep the elasticity in those tendons. And it's so amazing to me, because you'll hear people talk like in Pilates or yoga, sometimes they'll say, lengthen your muscle, okay, your muscles never gonna get longer, your muscle has an origination point, and an insertion point. And that's where it's connected to your bone. And it's connected with the connective tissue that we talked about. And that connective tissue gets stiffer or more elastic. Right. And we are opening I mean, we are extending the muscle, but the muscle was never gonna get longer than where it started its origination point and where it ended its insertion point, okay, but we can use it and teach the muscle to more easily expand and contract. So you're not going to end up like Gumby with like extra long arms and legs somewhere. So I hope you explore some of these ways to get some resistance on your body to understand like the incredible value in using your muscles on a regular basis. Not only does it look beautiful when people are toned and have some muscular structure to their body, but it's incredibly important for your bone health, your Hormonal Health, and just your capacity to physically function and enjoy a good quality of life. This is something I've always said like I will do whatever I can to ensure that as long as I live, I am not physically limited by my body because of something I didn't do. Right? I know, my body can train and respond. And yes, I know it takes effort. And yes, I know it's uncomfortable. And yes, I know, you've got to work through a lot of fluids to help you get to a place where you can do it and it fits and it's fun. So I want you to ask yourself this question. How could you make it fun? If you know that using your muscles? Is this beneficial to your overall health? How could you make it fun? Think about that. What could be fun, doesn't have to be in a gym lifting free weights with all the big incredible hog guys, what could be fun? Now if you want help with that, this is something I love to do. And you can find me at the breast cancer recovery coach.com where I have one on one sessions available, metabolic health coaching packages available, and my ultimate the better than before breast cancer membership where you literally have everything and we talk about nutrition and we talk about exercise and we talk about mindset and we work through emotions and we do all the things that support a body in living a life that truly is better than before breast cancer and it is 100% possible. All right. So look it up the breast cancer recovery coach.com and let me know what you think I'll talk to you soon
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