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STRONG HEALTHY BONES
Strong and healthy bones are dense and resilient, providing the body with structure, protecting the organs, and storing essential minerals like calcium. Maintaining optimal bone health involves a balanced intake of calcium and vitamin D, engaging in weight-bearing exercise, and avoiding harmful habits like smoking and excessive alcohol use.
Bones are living tissues that are constantly being broken down and rebuilt. This natural cycle allows them to adapt and strengthen in response to physical demands. Weight-bearing and impact exercises – like resistance training or jumping – stimulates bone growth by applying external pressure. These activities also build muscle, which further encourages bone strength, as muscles exert tension on the bones during movement.
Bodyweight exercises like yoga can be an excellent starting point for building strong bones. However, as your bones adapt to your bodyweight, incorporating resistance training alongside yoga becomes essential to continue challenging the skeletal system and improving bone density. Like muscles, bones require progressively increasing load to grow stronger and remain healthy. That is why I’ve teamed up with Stronger You – to bring together yoga and resistance training so you can get the best of both worlds and boost your bone health.
YOGA & BONE HEALTH
Yoga provides a wide range of benefits for bone health, making it a valuable practice for individuals of all ages. It helps reduce the risk of falls and supports bone strength through improved posture, balance, muscle conditioning, and stress reduction. Additionally, yoga promotes effective movement patterns, enhances coordination, and improves body awareness – key elements that not only support bone integrity but also prepare the body for more advanced resistance training. When viewed through the lens of yoga, the formula for bone health becomes clear: balance + core strength + proper posture + stress relief = stronger, healthier bones.
Posture and alignment - good posture is essential for bone health, especially as we age. Poor alignment places uneven pressure on certain bones, leading to excessive wear and potential damage over time. A neutral, aligned posture evenly distributes gravitational load, which stimulates bone growth and density. Yoga helps strengthen the postural muscles that support proper alignment and increases awareness of posture throughout daily life. It also releases tight areas that may pull the body out of alignment. Maintaining an upright posture not only protects the bones but also improves balance and reduces fall risk.
Balance training - balance is a vital life skill — and one that is very trainable, especially through yoga. Balance relies on three key elements: strong postural muscles, proprioception (your sense of spatial awareness), and cognitive function (your ability to perform tasks). Yoga targets all three. It builds core and stabilising muscles, sharpens proprioception as you move mindfully through different poses, and provides mental challenges through working out how to transition from pose to pose. Improved balance enhances everyday mobility and decreases the likelihood of falling. While all yoga sequences offer balance work, you’ll find targeted balance training in my Standing strong, Build better balance, and Everyday balance sequences.
Strong, smarter muscles - yoga strengthens the entire body while enhancing coordination, agility, and reaction time – skills for avoiding falls and staying balanced. In our yoga practice, we also focus on key areas that support bone health – strengthening the core will protect the lower back, which naturally loses density as we age; and targeting the hips, legs, and feet gives a solid base for a strong, stable spine. With time, these movement patterns become second nature, making everyday actions smoother and more stable.
Stress reduction - chronic stress elevates cortisol levels in the body, a hormone known to reduce bone mineral density and compromise bone strength. One of yoga’s most well-known benefits is stress relief. Slow, mindful movement, breathwork, meditative flow, and myofascial release (MFR) all activate the parasympathetic nervous system — your body’s “rest and restore” mode. This activation helps lower cortisol levels, supporting not just your bones, but your overall well being.
EXPLORING BONES HEALTH FLOW IN YOUR PRACTICE
This sequence offers lots of opportunities to explore the bone health formula – balancing drills, core activation and plenty of challenging flows to build strong feet, ankles, legs, hips & spine. You can gently bring down your nervous system to a state of relaxation by using the breath cues as you flow.
The first row starts with five balance challenges. In the fourth one, stand with one foot on a brick and circle the hanging leg from front to back. The fifth challenge trains your proprioception – stand on one leg and look up, down, to the right and to the left three times. The second and third row are the main three standing flows. Repeat each of these two or more times on both sides depending on how long you would like to practice for. The sequence finishes off with some slow two pose breath linked poses to finish off the practice with some grounding seated poses before you take savasana.
CAUTION: If you have been diagnosed with low bone density it would be advised to practice near a wall when you are doing balance drills; avoid deep spine flexion; work on active range of movement (AROM) rather than passive range of movement (PROM); and avoid inversions with a risk of fall (eg handstand, headstand).
ALIGNMENT CUES
Have a read of the tips below and either print out the sequence or save it onto your device:
Move slowly to capture all the opportunities to strengthen the muscles. Inhale is indicated with a ‘+’, exhale is a ‘-”.
Take a few extra breaths in the single leg balancing poses to build your balancing muscles in your feet, ankles, legs and hips.
Repeat the two standing flows for two or three rounds per side, stepping right leg forward first then left leg.
Give yourself at least 5 mins in Savasana to transition back into your day.
To save the images for personal use click and hold down the image until the ‘save image’ option appears; on Mac hold down ‘control’ and click the image to get the option box; on PC right click on the image to get the option box. Scroll down in the ‘option box’ and click ‘save image’.
Ruth Delahunty Yogaru
