Most of us worry about strengthening our muscles when we train, so we spend all of our time focusing on those muscle-building movements. But muscles are just one of our body’s support systems — you can’t forget your bones!

Stronger bones are more resistant to impact, which means they’re less likely to break or fracture if you fall, jump, step, or land wrong. Strengthening your bones while you’re young can help to reduce the risk of bone degeneration as you get older. The stronger your bones, the more wear and tear they can take.

Here are a few workouts that benefit your bones.

Resistance Training

Lifting weights is about so much more than just your muscles. Don’t get me wrong: resistance training targets your muscles. However, adding a lot of heavy weight to your bones forces them to adapt just like your muscles do. Your body builds more muscle tissue to compensate for the heavy weight and adds more tissue to your bones as well. The best type of resistance training for your bones is VERY heavy weight — using 85-95 percent of your 1-Rep Max Weight and doing sets of 1-3 reps.

Jumping Rope

Every time you jump, you force your bones to work together with your muscles, joints, and connective tissues to propel you off the ground, and every time you land, you’re placing a bit of strain on the bones. Don’t worry, this is the good kind of strain. It stimulates the production of new bone mass because your body senses that your current bone health isn’t up to the task of repeated jumping. Jumping rope can do wonders to strengthen the bones in your feet, ankles, legs, and even lower back thanks to that constant jumping and landing motion.

Jump Training

Plyometric training, also known as jump training, is excellent for building stronger, healthier bones. Jump training involves high-impact exercise, and that impact sends signals to your body that your bones need to be strengthened in order to keep up with the movement. You’ll find that jump training can not only improve your bone density, but it will make you more agile, contributing to lower risk of injuries as you move and exercise.

Running

Running and jogging are both excellent for your bones! Running is a moderate-impact exercise, which means it will place some strain on your bones but isn’t as high-impact as anything involving jumping. The fact that you’re stepping over and over again for 30 to 60 minutes at a time means your lower body is going to get some wear and tear. Your body compensates for this wear and tear by strengthening your bones, joints, connective tissue, and muscles.

Yoga/Pilates

Both of these workouts are excellent for your bone health. While neither are high-impact, they do involve a lot of load-bearing movements. For example, inverted poses that rest all of your weight on your hands, wrists, and neck. As your muscles grow stronger to adapt to these poses, so too your bones will be strengthened to compensate.

_{[Image via Shutterstock]}