Almost everyone knows about the increased dangers of falling and breaking bones
as we age. But traditional workout programs never really focused on enhancing
bone strength to aid in the fight against osteoporosis.
OsteoStrong, a five-year-old wellness studio franchise operation owned by Yvonne
and Jim Parsons, who originally brought Curves for Women to town, hopes to
change that.
“We help people with issues with bone health,” said Yvonne, explaining that
people stop producing the mineral and tissue that make our bones strong after we
turn 30. “If you’re playing tennis or you’re doing high impact sports — hiking,
running, tennis, those kinds of things — generally people maintain their bone
mass. But as we age, especially for women, we start losing it when we start
menopause because our body leaches the calcium out of our bones.”
That leads to osteoporosis or osteopenia, with half of all women and a third of
all men over 50 eventually breaking a bone. “It’s the third leading cause of
death after 65,” said Parsons ominously. “Forty percent of people who have a
fracture will be staying in a nursing home after 65, and 20 percent will never
walk again.”
Developed by biomechanics engineer John Jaquish, OsteoStrong works on the
principle of “osteogenic” loading
. Using
super-resistance machines that cover every section of the body — a chest press,
leg press, core pull, and skeleton-stressing vertical lift that resemble weight
machines and feature feedback monitors — OsteoStrong clients come in once a
week, briefly stand on vibration platforms to warm up, then exert 30 seconds of
all-out force at each workout station. A session is designed to take
approximately 10 minutes from start to finish.
Parsons offered a few analogies to explain how it works. “If you go into a dark
room, how long does it take for your pupil to enlarge? If you start to put your
hand on a fire, how quickly does your body respond by pulling it away?” she
asked. “It just is like a nanosecond, so it only takes five seconds to hit the
degree that you need to for the axial loading when you’re doing it on the
equipment.”
Curious to try it out? An initial visit is free.