Numerous recent reports have estimated the number of people living with Type-2 diabetes in the United States to be around twenty million, with another forty-five million showing pre-diabetic symptoms. This is an alarming number since this disease is completely preventable, and is mostly caused by years of inactivity coupled with a poor diet. Type-2 diabetes is different from Type-1 diabetes, in that Type-1 is an immunodeficient prenatal disease that causes your own immune system to attack its own body’s cells that are needed in glucose regulation. Type-2, or adult-onset diabetes, stems from the person demonstrating hyperglycemic (high blood sugar) characteristics for too long, and now the cells of glucose regulation are damaged and not working properly. Many of the foods in Americans diets today include some form of processed sugar, so there is ALMOST no way to avoid ingesting any of this type of nutrient. There are many reports on the amount of activity that is essential to weight and health maintenance, but what about the effects these have on pre-diabetic and people with Type-2 diabetes?
It should be known that aerobic exercise has many benefits when it comes to helping maintain a healthy blood glucose levels. However, more and more studies coming our recently have shown that resistance training can be more beneficial in regulating blood glucose. This comes from the fact that glucose can enter the skeletal muscle without the help of the insulin signaling pathway which is damaged in people with diabetes. This increased glucose uptake has been shown up to four days after in more advanced weightlifter, to about one to two days for people who are just beginning a resistance training regiment. As the muscle is contracting it does not need insulin to move blood glucose, thus the mechanisms of the muscle automatically create a pathway for glucose to enter. Resistance training when compared to aerobic exercise has been shown to maintain fat free mass which is critical in raising one’s resting metabolic rate which overall helps the stability of blood glucose. However even without the addition of muscle mass, skeletal muscle still had a higher clearance rate of glucose. Showing us that it is not just the amount of muscle, but that the muscle is getting smarter in the way it uptakes glucose. As time goes on the body will not need as much insulin to move the same amount of glucose, and will become more insulin sensitive, moving them in the opposite direction of diabetes and metabolic syndrome. This does not mean resistance training is the only answer, as aerobic exercise helps to add to one’s daily energy expenditure which is also important; higher energy expenditure means less time for sugar to circulate in the blood, and more of it being used as fuel in skeletal muscle and other tissues of the body. Overall, resistance training may be a good transition into aerobic exercise for those who have not done so in a while. It is a more moderate way to get the body used to moving again. Resistance training integrated with aerobic exercise and proper nutrition will help reduce hyperglycemia along with many of the other health-related issues that come with diabetes.
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/25/suppl_1/s64.full
