Your reason for doing exercise may be to stay in shape, or for the pleasure of it, but do you know about the other ways in which sport benefits your body? Osteopath Caroline Bonnière told me about how exercise can prevent certain aches and pains. It's all about the way using your muscles gives your bones extra density; let's see if I can explain it to you in layman's terms…
The osteopath simply puts it this way: “To look after your body, you have to move”. So far, so good... “By stimulating your muscles, demanding efforts from them as part of the exercise, you create tiny lesions that'll allow them to get stronger day after day”, explains Caroline Bonnière. Cross-training, the sport she cites as an example, thus makes all the muscle groups in the body work.
There's something crucial to add here. You have to exercise correctly. “You have to be careful and to adpot the right postures: that applies to all sports. Hence the importance of obtaining good advice. Horseriding, for instance, requires you to hold yourself upright and follow the horse's movement in a flexible manner. That's the only way the rider stacan y balanced and the back muscles can work properly”. Extending and flexing your muscles, session after session, will also have an impact on your bones, Caroline Bonnière points out. “Repeated flexions and extensions of our muscular mass makes our articulations work. The frequent loads on our bones give rise to thicker bone density, strengthening them . Generally speaking, what happens when you exercise is that your bone structure is strengthened and this helps prevent the onset of such ailments as osteoporosis, polyarthritis and lumbago. Atonic muscles, on the other hand, do nothing to protect your skeleton”. So exercise doesn't just affect your muscle mass, it also acts on your bones.
You can do exercise whatever your age, and it'll do you a world of good: It's even highly recommended to do exercise at any age! Past the age of 30, individuals lose 0.5% of their muscle mass per year. “Exercise, of the right kind for each stage of life, is like an anti-ageing elixir; it helps to regenerate our tissues by providing them with a good supply of oxygen, says the osteopath. Swimming, cross training, fitness walking, yoga… The important thing is to adopt the correct postures, that allow you to exercise the right way. And of course, to enjoy it!”
Decathlon journalist
I love horse riding, run when I have the time (which is not a lot). I include sport wherever I can in my life, particularly in my job - writing.~