Diabetes For Dummies, 4th Edition by Alan L. Rubin MD

Author:Alan L. Rubin, MD [Alan L. Rubin, MD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley Publishing
Published: 2012-08-02T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Keep It Moving: Creating Your Exercise Plan

In This Chapter

Understanding the importance of exercise

Tailoring exercise for type 1 and type 2 patients

Determining how long and how hard to exercise

Picking an activity you like

In the Standards of Medical Care in Diabetes 2012, the American Diabetes Association makes the following recommendations:

People with diabetes should perform at least 150 minutes each week of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity (50 to 70 percent of maximum heart rate), spread over at least three days per week, with no more than two consecutive days without exercise.

In the absence of a medical reason not to, people with type 2 diabetes should perform resistance training at least twice per week.

If your time is limited, you don’t have to set aside an hour daily to do your physical activity, although that amount would be best. Since the last edition of this book, numerous studies have suggested that many other approaches to exercise can greatly improve control of type 2 diabetes and prevent prediabetes from turning into diabetes. Here are some of the best approaches:

Doing just two 20-second sprints (high intensity) on an exercise bike three times a week has been shown to prevent type 2 diabetes and to lower the blood glucose if diabetes is present.

Doing one minute of high-intensity exercise followed by one minute of rest, performed for 20 minutes (for a total of 10 minutes of intense exercise), three times a week, dropped average blood glucose levels from 137 mg/dl to 119 mg/dl.

Using a pedometer to ensure a minimum amount of daily walking may reduce your chance of getting diabetes by half.

In this chapter, you discover why exercise is important, how much and what kinds you need to do to make a difference, and which specific exercises are best for you.

Getting Off the Couch: Why Exercise Is Essential

More than 60 years ago, the great leaders in diabetes care declared that diabetes management has three major aspects:

Proper diet

Appropriate medication

Sufficient exercise

When the diabetes experts wrote their recommendations for proper care, the isolation and administration of insulin had just recently begun, and they were focusing specifically on how to control type 1 diabetes. Since that time, many studies have shown that exercise doesn’t normalize the blood glucose or reduce the hemoglobin A1c (see Chapter 7) in type 1 diabetes. Many other studies have shown that exercise does normalize blood glucose and reduce hemoglobin A1c in type 2 diabetes.

Although exercise cannot replace medication for the type 1 diabetic, its benefits are crucial for patients with both types of diabetes.

Preventing macrovascular disease

The major benefit of exercise for both types of diabetes is to prevent macrovascular disease (heart attack, stroke, or diminished blood flow to the legs). Macrovascular disease affects everyone, whether they have diabetes or not, but it’s particularly severe in people with diabetes. Exercise prevents macrovascular disease in numerous ways:

Exercise helps with weight loss, which is especially important in type 2 diabetes.

Exercise lowers bad cholesterol and triglycerides, and it raises good cholesterol.

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