Hop Like a Bunny And Live A Long, Bone-Strong Life
At one time, I could do it. Run a 10-minute mile that is. (Once, in a 5K, I even ran an eight-minute mile!). But today my best is about 11 or 12 minutes, unless I'm running at the gym. Which is bad news, because, according to Gretchen Reynolds at The New York Times, " B ones should be jarred, for their own good. Past experiments have definitively established that subjecting bones to abrupt stress prompts them to add mass or at least reduces their loss of mass as people age." What hasn't been known is just how much force is required. And the really bad news is that, it's a lot. (I can't help thinking about the resident who told me, when I broke my wrist in December, "If you were younger, you wouldn't have broken it.") Reynolds reports that research showed that running a 10-minute mile or jumping up onto and down from a box at least 15 inches high was needed to produce forces great enough to rebuild bone. "The significance of these...