What doesn’t break your bones makes them stronger. Especially if what doesn’t break your bones is a load-bearing sport like basketball or volleyball. How to we know? Because when researchers at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden measured the bone mass of more than 800 young men and studied their exercise habits, they found that after five years, the men who did a lot of load-bearing activities at the start of the study and those who increased their amounts of exercise during the five years had a better chance of building bone than those who weren’t as active, according to a recent report in HealthDay. And now the numbers: The researchers found that men who played load-bearing sports for four hours a week or more had an average 1.3 percent increase in hip-bone density, while who remained sedentary over the five years had an average 2.1 percent decrease in hip-bone density. Read more in HealthDay. Read an abstract of the study here.