Originally Posted by
Seattle Forrest
Yeah, you hike and backpack too, as do I, and that should help. We both ski, also. Maybe I'll do more running when I heal.
Do you have a family history of osteoporosis? I'm sure there's a genetic component to susceptibility. I've heard the same many times about road cycling being terrible for bone density, interestingly MTB isn't nearly so harmful because of all the impact. But it's rare for me to MTB, I have to travel to the eastern slope and rent one.
I wish I could take a longer course of pred!
Yes, my mom was osteoporotic, especially spinal. Not an athlete. In a convoluted way, she died of it. OTOH, I'm one of a very small number of cyclists whom I know who never broke a bone cycling. The only bone I've ever broken was from a leader fall when I broke my coccyx landing on a conical rock. Walked up stairs backwards for 6 weeks.
Here's a good discussion of the complex ways in which exercise affects bone density:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles...019.00060/full
It's too complicated to excerpt a quote here. Read at least the first page.
In any case, it seems that, as canklecat opined, bone loss is not from calcium loss through sweat, but rather through the simple fact of hard exercise without a powerful bone stress component.
Another factor is simply age.
With advancing age, the amount of bone resorbed by the osteoclasts is not fully restored with bone deposited by the osteoblasts and this imbalance leads to bone loss. Thus, aging and osteoporosis are intimately linked.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3659822/
In any case, denial is not just a river in Africa. If you've not been tested, you're as ignorant of your mineral bone density as I was. I'm getting medication, more dietary calcium, more consistent weight work and will get another DXA scan in a couple years.