Hi, I'm Margaret Martin at MelioGuide.
And I thought I would share with today a review of why it's so important when you have low
bone density to move carefully and meticulously.
And so we're always looking for best alignment, and we're trying to do all our daily activities
with our best alignment.
So when I will be explaining the difference between flexion, it's meaning not wanting
you to be doing the slouching movements where you're looking for more extension which is
safer.
And I'm going to go through that in more detail.
Let's have a look at the vertebral column, and that's our spinal column.
Our head is sitting at the very top, and then our pelvis is sitting on either side of the
sacrum.
So this vertebral column would be the side view of my vertebral column based on how I'm
standing right now.
Here's the stomach side and here's the back side.
So if I go to feel the little knobby bits behind my neck, what I'm feeling is the spinous
process back here.
So the stomach side, which is what we're concerned about when it comes to osteoporosis, because
that's the part that tends to get compression fractures, or compressions it's sometimes
called.
That's the vertebral body, and within that vertebral body, there's a different kind of
bone.
So on the outside we can see a hard bone, and that's a cortical bone.
On the inside it's a trabecular, or spongy bone.
And between every vertebrae, we have a disc.
So let's have a close-up look at this.
What I have here is a magnified model that I created of two vertebrae.
It doesn't have the spinous process but it does have the bodies of the vertebrae.
On the outside, as I've shown on the chart, it looks like hard, firm bone.
You have one vertebrae, you have disc, another vertebrae disc and that goes down all the
way along the vertebral column.
But the inside of the vertebrae isn't hard firm bone.
It's actually spongy bone, and so the inside of the bone is actually very spongelike.
And as the sponge would be very vibrant and moving, unlike a hard firm little sponge which
allows the vertebrae to be light, allows flexibility within the vertebrae.
It absorbs shocks.
But important to realize that that sponge as it's absorbing forces is always going to
be strongest when it absorbs the forces evenly.
And so when you are standing in your best alignment and distributing forces evenly throughout
the day, all of those little trabeculae on the inside absorb the forces evenly.
So you have all those thousands of little trabeculae absorbing the forces.
And that's great.
But if you are constantly doing things that bring you into a forward bend, where you're
slouching without realizing, you know, a bad cough and you're coughing and then you go
to tie your shoes, and then you go in and reach into the fridge, and you have a constant
forward leaning on the front of the vertebral bodies, eventually those little trabeculae,
maybe not the first time, but each time you do something a few of them crack.
And then a few more crack, and then a few more crack.
So it's not that one time when you go to open the window, or the one time that you, you
know, weren't careful and you vacuumed, you know, reaching underneath bending your back.
It's not that one incident usually that causes a fracture and a crack in the outer shell.
Its those thousands of little repeated motions that snaps one of the trabeculae, one of the
cross bridges in this internal sponge of the body of the vertebrae.
Another one snaps, another one snaps, and eventually when you go to do something, that
little internal scaffolding is going, I can't hold you up anymore and an outer crack develops.
And then from an outer crack, you start getting more compression of the vertebrae, which is
why oftentimes they won't diagnose it as a vertebral fracture, but rather a vertebral
compression.
Because what happens is you're getting a slow compression of the vertebral body.
And so keep those flexions that you want for precious moments in your life that, you know,
you won't be thinking about your body in terms of, you know, grandkids running up to you.
And you just, you know, scoop down, pick them up and not using up any of those forward flexion
moves for things like crunches and movements that you shouldn't be doing anyway.
So when looking at the sea sponge, here I have two samples of sea sponge.
And you'll notice how the top one is less dense than the bottom one.
So the bottom one would be somebody with more normal bone density and here at the top one
would be somebody who's starting to lose density of the bone.
So you're going to see that there's more space between the cross bridges.
There's not as many cross bridges.
So that means when you're starting to put pressure on the vertebrae that this one's
just not going to be able to handle, this less dense vertebrae isn't going to handle
as much pressure as a more dense vertebrae.
Now just to bring back into context where this sea sponge is in regards to your bones,
that's the trabecular bone.
And that trabecular bone, this is an example of a seal bone that I found on a beach in
California.
And I brought it home, I dug, kindly took a chunk out of it.
He exposed, here's that nice outer shell, the cortical bone, the hard bone that I showed
you earlier that you could see in the photos.
But on the inside, through the whole vertebrae, is that sea sponge type bone.
So it's not a very, very strong bone, and so that little sea sponge bone, that's the
trabecular bone.
We have a lot of it in our spine.
We have it in our ribs.
We have it in our hips.
So these are the bones that tend to fracture the most when we have concerns with low bone
density and osteoporosis.
Well, hopefully that helps to explain the difference between the two types of bone and
the reason to be more cautious.
I hope you found this section informative.
I look forward to seeing you next time on MelioGuide.