The question I get more than almost any other, the moment someone tells me they’ve been diagnosed with osteoporosis, is some version of this: “Mikah, what poses do I need to avoid?”

I understand it completely. When you find out your bones are more fragile than you thought, the first instinct is to figure out what to take off the table. What to stop doing before you hurt yourself. It feels responsible. It feels safe.

But I want to walk you through why that question, all on its own, can leave you more stuck and more afraid than you need to be. And then I want to give you something a lot simpler to carry around instead.

This post goes along with this week’s episode of my podcast, Yoga for Longevity. If you’d rather listen than read, you can press play right below. And if you want to practice this kind of movement with me, you can always try Lifelong Yoga Online free for seven days.

For a long time, the advice for osteoporosis was strict and a little frightening. Don’t bend. Don’t twist. Don’t lift anything heavy. Be careful. If you’ve heard some version of that, I understand why it gets repeated. It comes from wanting to keep you safe. A lot of that guidance was actually written for people who already had spinal fractures, the most cautious group of all, and over the years it got handed to everyone with osteoporosis, even people who were newly diagnosed and otherwise strong and active.

The guidance has come a long way since then. In 2022, a group of experts in the UK pulled the research together into a consensus statement called Strong, Steady and Straight. What they found is more hopeful than what most of us were taught. For people with osteoporosis, movement is generally safe, and the benefits of moving tend to outweigh the risks. They were clear that the goal is to do more, not less, and to focus on how to move rather than handing people a long list of don’ts.

That doesn’t mean anything goes. But the part that calls for real care is narrower than you might think, and it comes down to three things.

The first one matters most. Be careful with deep forward folds where your back rounds, especially with weight pulling you down into that round. This is the repeated, end-range rounding the research points to, and it includes things like sit-ups and crunches. You don’t have to stop folding. You change how you fold. You hinge from your hips, keep your back long, bend your knees, and rest your hands on a block or a chair so you’re not collapsing all the way down. And you don’t need crunches for a strong core. There are better ways to build the deep stability that supports your spine.

The second is forceful twisting, the kind where you crank yourself around as far as you can go. We don’t avoid twisting, because you twist in real life all the time, reaching for your seatbelt, turning to talk to someone behind you. You twist with length. You stay tall, lengthen up first, and turn from your upper back without wrenching.

The third is really one idea that covers everything else. Keep length in your spine, no matter what you’re doing. In a backbend, keep your neck long instead of cranking your head back. In a side bend, reach up and out instead of collapsing into one side. Whatever direction you move, the answer is the same. Stay long.

And did you notice? All three come back to the same thing. Don’t collapse. Keep length. Which is exactly why I want to give you one simple cue to carry with you, so you can stop trying to memorize a list.

Take a finger and find the bottom of your breastbone. Take another and find your navel. The space in between, right under your heart, is the part of your spine I care about most. Keep that space long and open. Don’t let it collapse. That’s the whole thing. Whether you’re folding forward, twisting, reaching down to the dishwasher, or getting out of bed, if you keep that space long, you are protecting the most vulnerable part of your spine.

There’s a name for that area. It’s called the thoracolumbar junction, the place where your upper spine meets your lower back, roughly where your fingers just were. It’s one of the most common places spinal compression fractures happen, partly because it’s a transition zone, where the more rigid upper spine meets the more mobile lower back. When we round and collapse forward through it, over and over, day after day, pressure builds on the front of those bones, and that’s where the spine can start to wedge and fracture. Keeping length spreads that load out instead of dumping it on the one spot that can least handle it.

I call this Space, and it’s the first piece of a method I teach called SPACE. But that first letter, the keeping-space part, is the one I want you to walk away with. It’s the difference between moving through your life afraid of your own body, and moving through it with one simple thing to come back to.

Because this was never really about your yoga mat. It’s about how you bend to tie your shoes, how you lift a laundry basket, how you get down to the floor and back up again. That’s where your spine is loaded, all day long. The mat is just where you practice. You don’t have to be careful for the rest of your life. Careful is exhausting, and it’s not much of a plan. You get to be strong and steady and confident in how you move. You just need to know how.

PS, if reading this makes you want to learn it properly, I built something for exactly that. It’s called Strong Bones, Safe Yoga, and it takes this whole method and walks you through how to apply it to every movement of your spine, so you can move in every direction with confidence instead of avoiding them. It’s coming soon, and the people on the priority list will be the first to know when it opens, plus they’ll get the best pricing it will ever have. You can join the priority list right here.