Growing Frame

Your frame gives you strength. The bones in the body anchor muscles and tissue throughout as the scaffold for everything that makes up the body. Life is the picture and the skeleton is the frame. Our bones make up 40 percent of the total weight of the body. People start off with many more at birth than remain at death, going from close to 300 bones at birth to 206 by adulthood. What does it say that as our bodies expand the frame holding us consolidates? It is as though we are a puzzle in youth and find form once all the pieces have had time to bond. Bones throughout the body are constantly being remade and renewed.

Solid

Human bones are nearly 5 times stronger than steel when compared by weight. A cubic inch of bone can withstand about 19,000 pounds of pressure, about four times the strength of concrete. The strength of bones comes from simple organic materials as well being composed of calcium, collagen, phosphate, and water. Moreover, the unique structures throughout bones that minimize their overall weight while also focusing on distributing stress equally throughout each as well as emphasize absorption rather than abrupt breaks during decades of function, referred to as toughness, make them exceptional from the start. Injuries do still occur as people push their bodies to those breaking points and inescapable high impact situations arise with more than 6.8 million people breaking bones each year in the United States.

Reinforced

There has been research around creating porous materials for repairing portions of the body that have been injured. These are largely around injuries to bones and joints but also to the systems that supplement functioning within the body. There is strength in the body from our bones but those moving from the mind seek to break the already high capabilities the body has achieved. Explorations of ways to reinforce the bones in the body have spread. We see those with already incredible abilities conceived in the media being pushed to still greater heights through these extensions. The strength of our frames has become seen as another bottleneck or threshold to be pushed through with technology. The need for progress today moves people to seek the latest edge possible in strength, toughness, and performance. Much of the past decades of performance improvements have been through external and performance field improvements. Shoes, equipment, and pavement are a few. Have we reached a bottleneck that is yet acknowledged and supplemented through these other areas with room for improvement? Technique being the baseline for excellence and one reached widely at the highest levels leaves few areas for further improvement among the most elite workers and performers. The frame in which we live changes regularly but what is possible is still being seen.