Strength training helps diabetes more than cardio.
We all have heard how important exercise is to our health and wellness. My patients tell me that they walk all the time. People have been taught that aerobic exercise is the most healthy exercise to do, but it is not. I’m not saying that cardiovascular health is not important. I’m saying that we can gain cardiovascular health and musculoskeletal health with the same exercise routine. Progressive resistance exercise is the best for diabetics.
What is strength training?
First off, as complicated as the term is, strength training or progressive resistance exercise is a form of exercise that you may already be familiar with. It’s the use of free weights or exercise machines with weight stacks or bands or rods as the resistance to push or pull against. The progressive part is the idea that you need to increase the resistance in some way over time to cause your muscles to adapt to this new level of resistance.
This adaptation is called strength. And with this strength adaptation, you will also get a change in the amount of muscle tissue that you have in your body. This increase in muscle mass, as well as bone, tendon, and ligament, will lead to better insulin sensitivity.
How do you do it?
Strength training sounds complicated, but it just means that we are increasing the stress on the muscle as we get stronger with each exercise session. The resistance can be in the form of body weight, exercise weights, sandbags, springs, or bands.
We can increase the stress on the muscle by increasing the number of times that we do a movement, the repetitions or reps. We can also just increase the amount of stress by increasing the angle of our body during the movement, the amount of weight on the bar, the size of the kettlebell or sandbag, or the number or strength of the springs or bands.
Why do strength training?
In order for muscles, ligaments, tendons, and even bones to get stronger, the resistance has to increase each session. Even small changes in resistance in each session can compound over a month or a year of training. Having our musculoskeletal system get stronger increases our lifespan by protecting us from injury.
Specifically, strength training for diabetics increases muscle mass and helps insulin work better in the body preventing or reducing the damage from diabetes. Increasing muscle mass also increases bone mass by increasing the stress on the bones which makes them grow stronger without drugs. And being stronger protects you from one of the highest risks for death as we age, slipping and falling. An increase in muscle in the body also affects other good hormones in the body like testosterone and growth hormone. These hormones keep the body and mind healthy and increase our feeling of well-being. Again, progressive resistance exercise is the best for diabetics!
Why is strength training better than cardio?
Strength training with enough resistance can also increase cardiovascular health as it’s difficult and makes you breathe hard and your heart beat stronger. So you get all the positive effects that you need from an exercise routine in less time. You can also alternate days of each if you are a die-hard cardio person. But you will eat into your precious recovery ability by trying to do too much so I wouldn’t recommend doing both at first. So, progressive resistance exercise is very good for someone just starting an exercise program. But it’s also for someone who has done only cardio for a long time and lost muscle tissue because of it. It’s also good for someone that is busy as it gives you all you need in one routine. Strength training is good for everyone, but especially for diabetics.
Here’s the bottom line!
There is no age limit for building muscle as has been shown in many studies. People in their nineties can still build muscle! People don’t have to be afraid of building too much muscle as that is actually very hard to do as any high-level athlete can tell you. Building large muscles requires a very specific program, diet, recovery, and testosterone levels. But with an average diet, recovery, and hormone level you can build enough muscle with a very simple program to keep you healthy and active. We’re looking to combat the natural decline in muscle mass, not to win a bodybuilding contest. But you will look better and feel better with even a little more muscle than you have right now. And the increase in muscle mass from strength training will help you to control your diabetes.