Welcome back to this week’s edition of 2-Minute Tuesdays where we are talking about one exercise topic for two minutes and giving you three reasons why you should follow our advice. Now this week, we are talking to those of you that are looking to use exercise to better manage your blood glucose levels. Maybe your doctor has told you that your blood glucose levels are starting to creep up or maybe you have been diagnosed with a condition where your blood glucose levels just sit a little bit higher. Either way exercise can help better manage your levels and here is how.
1) Use “All-The-time” Exercise
Exercise tip number 1 when using exercise to help manage your blood glucose levels: Use “all-the-time” exercise. This means moving throughout your day. Our rule of thumb that we like to use with clients is getting up and moving for 5 minutes out of 30 minutes or 10 minutes out of an hour. Do something that makes you get up every single hour.
Action Step: Set a timer on your phone to remind you to get up and move!
Related: E40 – What is Fit4T1D? – Fitness for Type 1 Diabetics
2) Do resistance training
Exercise Tip Number Two when using exercise to help manage your blood glucose levels: Make sure you are doing your resistance training. Resistance training will help you to build muscle and the more muscle that you have, the more sensitive to your insulin you will be. This means you will need less insulin to get blood glucose lower effects. This is really important! Doing resistance training is an absolute must.
Action Step: Check out Ft4T1D to get further guidance on exercising with Type 1 Diabetes.
Related: Weight Training – You need to do it for your entire life. Here’s why.
3) Use control
Exercise Tip Number Three when using exercise to help manage your blood glucose levels: use control when doing resistance training. A great way to manage blood glucose levels is to use exercise. But, you want to avoid getting injured because you need to return to exericse time and time again to keep getting benefits. Using control while you exercise can help to lessen your risk for injury so you can keep returning to exericse.
Action Step: Check out our podcast, Foundational Exercise for more tips on exercising to avoid injruy.
