Weight-bearing exercise is supposed to help with osteoporosis. The list of weight-bearing exercises includes walking. Is standing also considered a weight-bearing exercise? As far as the leg bones are concerned, is there any difference between standing and walking?
Standing does put longitudinal stress on the bones, but it isn’t as good exercise overall as walking. Walking is going to produce better circulation, will exercise the muscles and therefore better maintenance of bone mass. I guess pushing off with your leg to take a step is going to put somewhat more stress on the bones because it is a dynamic action.
I find it much easier to walk than to stand - I can do the former for an hour or more (when I walk Leet the Wonder Dog[sup]TM[/sup]) but my back hurts if I stand still for more than a few minutes. I don’t have osteoporosis, though.
Standing causes the blood to pool in your lower body, whereas walking uses the muscles to help pump it back to the heart and lungs.
Regards,
Shodan
I was just watching a video on youtube last night about the medical issues in the sci-fi show The Expanse, and while the show has nothing to do with this topic, one of the medial issues about living in space does. The guy in the video, who has a degree in space medicine, was saying that in your bones there is this balance between osteocytes, which are tearing down your bones, and osteoblasts, which are rebuilding it. Osteoblasts are triggered by stress, which is why athletes have stronger bones, and you can apparently tell if a tennis player is right handed or left handed just by the bone density in each arm.
You need a decent amount of stress to trigger the osteoblasts. The point in the video was that anyone living in space would have severe trouble with bone density in the long run (a lot longer than anyone has spent in space so far).
The same thing applies here. Standing is better than sitting, but still you aren’t going to be producing much bone stress to trigger the osteoblasts. Walking is better than standing since you are constantly shifting your weight around and that is going to put a lot more stress on the bones than standing. Personally I would think that you would need to do something a bit more stressful than walking to counter osteoperosis, but if the experts say that walking is good enough, then I believe them. They know more than I do about it.
Does weight-bearing exercise on one part of the body, e.g. the legs, help build bone in other parts of the body, e.g. back and shoulders? Or does one need to do weight-bearing exercise on each part of the skeletal structure? The remark above about osteoblasts raised this question for me.
(Bolding mine)
IIRC, osteoclasts are the cells that break down bone.
/nitpick