Type 2 diabetics need 2 types of exercise
Thanks to TYD to passing along the link. Roni Caryn Rabin reports in the NY Times:
Type 2 diabetics can significantly lower their blood sugar — and lose body fat in the bargain — with an exercise program that combines aerobics and weight lifting, a new study reports.
While that regimen is already recommended in Type 2 diabetes, researchers say the study offers some of the best evidence to date that a combined program offers greater benefits than aerobics or weight lifting by itself, even if it does not increase total exercise time.
“We can now look at individuals with diabetes right in the face and tell them, ‘This is the best exercise prescription for you,’” said the paper’s lead author, Dr. Timothy S. Church, director of preventive medicine research at Louisiana State University’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center.
Such a program consists of “about 100 minutes of higher-intensity aerobics a week, and then give yourself one to two days of resistance training for 15 to 20 minutes a day,” he said.
The study randomly divided 262 inactive Type 2 diabetics, average age 55.8, into four groups — 73 assigned to resistance training three days a week, 72 to aerobic exercise, 76 to the combination and 41 to a non-exercise comparison group. The study was notable in that almost half the participants were not white, and 63 percent were women.
After nine months of observed exercise, participants who did the combination training lowered their blood level of the glucose marker HbA1c to 7.3 percent from 7.7 percent, on average, a drop that corresponds to a significantly reduced risk of heart disease, Dr. Church said. The improvements in the other exercise groups were not significantly different from those in the non-exercise group.
Dr. Church said he was surprised but added that the findings made sense. “Diabetes is the failure to control the amount of sugar in your blood, and the biggest user of blood sugar is skeletal muscle,” he said. “The healthier your skeletal muscle, the more blood sugar it’s chewing up and taking out of the blood.”
I do the Nordic Track for aerobic exercise (currently 15 minutes per day, which is 105 minutes per week), and I do 3 hours of Pilates per week—that’s resistance training, so I think would count. I’ll be adding Pilates mat exercises and will bring out the kettlebell again in a couple of weeks.
