How Exercise Helps with Insulin Resistance
How Exercise Helps with Insulin Resistance
Type 2 diabetes is a condition in which your blood sugar levels are too high due to insulin resistance, where your body doesn’t effectively use insulin to break down sugars, despite producing it.
This can be dangerous for a number of reasons involving damage to your nervous system and internal organs. However, there is a way to make your body less resistant, or simply more sensitive to insulin: exercise.
Various studies have shown that exercising regularly can vastly improve how well your body uses insulin, even essentially reversing the condition in some cases. While you reverse the effects of insulin resistance, you’ll also be getting in better physical condition and improving your heart health.
The reason exercise has such a drastic effect is actually fairly simple. Glucose, the primary sugar found in blood that doesn’t get broken down in the case of diabetes, is your body’s primary source of fuel for all physical actions.
All of your cells produce energy by breaking down glucose in cellular respiration, even for little activities like breathing, talking, or even just moving your fingers. By engaging in more physical activity, you’ll be using more of that glucose on a regular basis, not even allowing it to make it into the bloodstream before being used as fuel.
So with less glucose in the blood, your body will actually be able to use the insulin effectively enough to regulate the levels in the bloodstream. Now, if you live a fairly non-active lifestyle already, adding in all this exercise might sound a bit daunting since you’re not used to it.
It’s really not as bad as it might sound, though. You don’t have to go out and walk for miles on end every single day, every singly week. It’s been shown that even just a 30 minute walk 3 times a week can make a significant difference in your insulin resistance.
Any sort of aerobic exercise will do. Aerobic exercises are ones that make you feel out of breath when you’re done with them or make your heart rate go up. A few common examples are jogging, walking, swimming, and riding a bike.
It’s also recommended to throw in some anaerobic exercises, such as weightlifting. This is because the more muscles you have, the more glucose your body will use when doing aerobic exercise, meaning your insulin will work a bit better.
