Why can’t young soldiers withstand the same stresses as they did decades ago? What’s more, military training has become mildened so that young men and women wouldn’t injure their bones. It’s no wonder that the incidence of injuries is high, when children grow up wrapped in cotton and protected from physical strain as they grow up. How can we unwrap them, and at what age is this unwrapping most crucial?
The strongest influence on bone fragility comes from genes, diet, and vitamins. But the lack of muscle and bone stress during bone growth follows very closely. The most crucial years for bone development are between eight and fourteen, nested within the wider “bracket” between birth and the early twenties. The more muscle stress and strenuous exercise that you experience during this time, the stronger your bones will become. If you don’t strengthen your bones during these years, you stand no chance of fixing them later because you reach peak bone density around the age of twenty. Bone growth continues to some degree throughout the twenties, and that gives you some breathing room to patch things up, but after thirty, your bone density goes downhill.
Let me illustrate the importance of bone strength with the example of tennis. All top tennis players start playing well before the age of 14, and they train hard. Exceptions are rare, and even then, it’s only older teenagers who succeed, and it’s only those who switched to tennis from some other sport. Even then, those who start late are more prone to injuries. Younes El Aynaoui, for example, did not start playing tennis until he was eighteen, and throughout his career, he was plagued by injuries that kept him off the court for months and even years.
The bones on the stronger arm, which play the majority of strokes, are much thicker and stronger than those on the weaker hand, because they have been exposed to intense stress. Of course, for the player to reach her or his peak, tennis skills and techniques are essential, and they develop better at a young age, but there’s no way around bone strength.
Today, we are all on vacation!
Throughout history, people have worked hard. Even children were involved in fairly heavy work from a young age, and by their teenage years, they were performing tasks that were virtually the same as those of adults. They were often barefoot or wore simple, hard-soled shoes.
Just two generations ago, children were workers even as they attended school. At dawn, they would take the cows to pasture, milk them, fetch water… after school, they would make hay, rake manure, carry firewood… An older neighbor from my village sometimes tells me stories about his youth, and he likes to take a pause at the end and then exclaim: “Ah, today, we’re all on vacation!”
The work was strenuous, and the muscular stress strengthened the bones. When paleontologists compare our ancestors’ skeletons with today’s townspeople, the difference is striking, whether they go back a hundred thousand or just a few hundred years. Paleontologists can be relied upon because bones are all they have, so they know how to analyze and compare them expertly.
It’s no wonder that today’s youth are losing bone mineral density, putting them at risk of fractures and osteoporosis, which they will invariably face as they get older, given the lack of stress on their bones. The thickened bones in their fingertips from tapping on screens are poor compensation for the deterioration of their skeleton everywhere else.
How bones grow and develop
Bones remodel when they are exposed to mechanical impulses: they are sensitive and responsive to stress. As the frequency of shock, vibration, and load increases, bone strength and density generally increase. The key here is the stress signal, which triggers bone strengthening. However, the signal is only triggered when the load is sufficiently high and there is some micro-damage. If the stress signal is (too) low, the opposite can happen: a weakening and a decrease in bone density.
Of course, exercising is of no use if you don’t bring essential nutrients into your body: vitamins D, C, and K, as well as calcium, silicon, boron, and magnesium. The best way to get vitamin D is to exercise outdoors, in the sun with at least some skin exposed – especially in the winter months when there is less sunlight.
In the first twenty years of your life, bone mass accumulates, and if you’re exposed to stress in that period, you will never be able to fill this gap later on: this is the most critical period. Then you have to maintain your bone mass until the age of fifty, and after fifty, you have to slow down its diminishing, again by stimulating the load signal. If you grew up cushioned in soft cotton during the first two decades of your life, you simply cannot fix your bone density later.
The blessing of scarcity
Soft sneakers were popular when I was growing up in the 1980s. They left me with some aftereffects, and even after many years of walking barefoot, I couldn’t normalize my feet completely. The soft shoes made the balls of my feet sink in a bit in the middle. It took me a long time to start using my big toe when walking and running. I can still feel the negative effects of soft shoes today, even though I’ve been barefoot for eighteen years now. Thank God I was mostly barefoot as a child, at least for a few weeks in the summer at the seaside.
Luckily, I did karate for a few years between elementary and high school. We trained barefoot, jumped, punched, and kicked each other, we fell on the wooden floor, did push-ups on our knuckles, and kneeled on the hard ground for punishment. Even when I had an accident and fell from six meters (18 feet), I instinctively rolled over and got away with only a mild concussion.
In high school, I walked and ran a lot. I walked two miles to school (and back), and in the evenings I went to parties on foot. I wore very plain old hard-soled Yugoslavian “Startas” shoes, and in them, I would run up to 25 km (15 miles). Because they were a bit too tight for me, I took them off often and ran barefoot. All these loads and impacts undoubtedly strengthened my bones.
At the peak of my bone mass development, I must have reached a pretty good maximum. Even today, I make sure to maintain my bone mass through stressful physical activity. It has to be adequate—not too little, not too much. This is the best prevention against bone weakening, especially against osteoporosis, which is a big threat to the majority of elderly people today.
Let us not weaken our children’s bones!
I recently came across a shiny advertisement on a shiny website where a shiny company is urging parents to afford their children only the best, as the new school year was starting. The ad promoted fashionable sneakers so kids would be as comfortable as possible during their daily activities.
I have to stress here that I’m not your average, uninformed reader. Recently, I found a study reporting an alarming decrease in bone mineral density in young adults and the onset of symptoms of osteoporosis at a much younger age than ever before! This links to the statement of the Australian army trainer, whose findings I quoted in my initial paragraph, and who noticed already in the late 1980s that young soldiers could not withstand the loads that the previous generation could. In soldiers, bone fractures most often occur in the tibia and metatarsal bones.
If you wear soft shoes, you simply cannot strengthen these bones adequately. Forgive me for not providing scientific proof, but as there is none (yet) I have to make the following statement based on experience and common sense: your bones respond to the absence of the load signal everywhere in your body, not only from the knee down. Your hip and vertebrae register this, and that is where critical fractures in the elderly are so common and so hazardous. Your bones absolutely need a load signal to have something to respond to and either get stronger or maintain their strength. If there is no load signal, they will weaken. You should stay safe, of course, but nowadays, very few people would be harmed by increasing muscle strain.
The strain is key to building bone mineral density. When kids run and jump barefoot, they hit the hard ground—well, unless they’re on one of these new rubber-surfaced playgrounds. It’s okay for them to stumble and push, to bump and scuff, to fall and pick themselves up. Bones sense it all and get stronger.
There is a lot of this kind of movement in most team sports, and in individual sports as well. For bone health, it’s better to engage in many sports than in only one. It’s better not to specialize too soon! And don’t forget about pains and stresses in everyday life! You can’t dig a hole in the ground, chop firewood, hammer a nail or a stake without hitting one object with another… You can’t build your bones without carrying objects, throwing them, twisting, breaking, assembling, and moving them…
Machines have relieved you of many of these movements, and you even frown upon physical work, thinking that it is inferior to mental work. But the human mind needs a healthy body to function well, which is why all urban youth sooner or later resort to some sports and fitness, as this is practically the only exercise available to them. Ideally, they should wear minimalist footwear or go barefoot as they do.
How to get a solid foundation
Let me emphasize something about the metatarsal bones and tibia: these are the most common bones to suffer injuries in young soldiers: it is undeniable that shoes deprive them of strengthening. All shoes, let alone those super soft sports shoes. Advertising that promises comfort is well-intentioned, but at what hidden cost?
If children were barefoot all the time and moved a lot, they would strengthen their feet more than in any shoes. If such children decided to serve in the military, they would have fewer injuries for sure!
Sometimes, random people ask me how to start running barefoot. I ask them to do it as carefully and gradually as possible. If you wore shoes for +20 (+30 or more) years, you will need time. Your feet will get stronger, but your bones have limited room to maneuver; the starting point is worse than if you walked barefoot throughout your youth, or at least if you wore thinner, uncushioned shoes. Unless you grew up like the Tarahumara (a community in Mexico, known for running extremely long distances in thin sandals), you shouldn’t expect to achieve anything comparable to what they can manage.
Not only are your bones weaker, but through your habits, you develop unnatural gait biomechanics. Shoes add weight to the end of the limb, thereby affecting your leg’s pendulum; you step with all your weight on the soft heel of your running shoe; you practically do not use your toes when walking; the arch of your foot is passive, because there’s rubber, gels and inserts in the sole and they do the shock-suspension instead of your foot arch. It takes time to switch this off and develop the foot, especially if you only run barefoot and wear shoes on all other occasions.
One thing is for sure: you can’t turn time back. That is why I beg all parents not to force their children to wear shoes. Ok, if it is unavoidable for whatever reason, let them do it, but in any other case, forget about it. When shoes are culturally enforced, let your children wear minimalist footwear: nowadays, there is plenty of choice of such shoes, and I bet your children will like it better than the “normal” shoes.
I saw this at the meeting of parents who homeschool and their children. Half of them wore minimalist shoes, and quite a few (including me) were barefoot. If you’re buying new barefoot shoes for yourself and your children, let me warn you not to fall into the advertisement trap! Big companies have noticed the interest, and they sell all kinds of “barefoot shoes.” Minimalist shoes have to be completely thin and light. The sole must be flexible like thin rubber or leather, without either the heel or the shoe tip raised even a bit.
It gives me the chills to see a toddler in clunky (“branded”) shoes, even though they’re barely walking! If you’re doing this to your children from such a small age, ask yourself what you’re afraid of. Are you more worried about what others will say, or do you actually care about the well-being of your daughter or son?
A lifetime investment
As Slovenian Dr. Tomaž Kocjan said, your bones are like a bank account: you deposit in your youth and withdraw in your old age. If you deposit a lot, then you have sufficient bones left until death; if not, then you will very likely suffer osteoporosis and fractures.
This summer, my friend stayed with me for two weeks with his sons, aged 10 and 11. The boys walked everywhere barefoot without any embarrassment, and their feet were firm, flexible, and strong—naturally so! Back home, when in school, and around the city, they wore minimalist footwear. Luckily, their father understands the difference and supports them to improve their bone “accounts” during these crucial years.
Plenty of varied barefoot movement throughout youth brings bone wealth, while scanty movement in soft shoes brings bone poverty.
Every now and then, I see disgust on the faces of people who pass by me due to my robust, fleshy, thick-skinned, and sometimes slightly reddish “paws.” They show me their thin, translucent, pale “human fishes”, claiming that theirs are normal feet. I smile when I see a bodybuilder in a swimsuit on a beach, built like a pit bull but with feet like a poodle. He walks all the way to the sea in his flip-flops and then whines as he steps on the round pebbles.
Is this natural? Your feet are the foundation of your humanness; they should be the toughest and most resilient part of your body. They’re not supposed to be pale and hyper-sensitive because of being constantly encapsulated within a bulletproof vest (a shoe).
Another thing that makes me smile is when I get a warning that running barefoot on asphalt is harmful. Of course, it is harmful if you are not used to it! I am. My feet are tough, and I’m determined to maintain their toughness even after the age of 50, as much as possible, of course.
If you’re not used to being barefoot, don’t rush it! But if you’re curious, do give it a try! A young Dutch woman recently told me that she used to have joint problems when walking and running. She gradually switched to barefoot shoes and found pleasure in running. No pain no more. Her overall posture has also improved, she said. Maybe this is just a weird exception, but maybe not… I keep learning about such “exceptions” more and more.
Where there’s a will, there are solutions
I emphasized barefooting for bone health because it is definitely fundamental. All your movement is based on walking and running, bones have evolved with a certain type of vibrations from your feet up, and your osteocytes are used to reading these signals from a certain threshold up. When you’re barefoot, you easily cross this threshold, while soft shoes dampen the signal.
It is worth adding manual work to the function of your feet. Your upper limbs need strengthening, too! Instead of a high degree of separation between mental and physical work, it would be beneficial to think about combining both of these types of activities and overcoming the stigma that physical work is inferior.
Complaining about missed opportunities is understandable, but it’s futile. Every single day in your life is perfect to start strengthening your movement and unwrapping from layers of soft cotton. You can learn a lot from soldiers: their bone injuries most often occur due to a sudden transition from no exercise to intense loads. You can be smarter and transition gradually, carefully, and moderately while also challenging yourself.
If you have invested enough in your bone account when you were young, pat yourself on your back! If not, try to preserve what you have as long as you can. If you have children, help them invest as much as possible in their bone account and, at least during those most critical years, do not wrap them in soft layers of cotton.
