Exercise and increased levels

[Kellyjay08]

Hi! I've been told that when exercising BGL should decrease so monitoring is needed to make sure it doesn't go too low. However mine goes from 5....... To an average of 14...... Does this happen to anyone else and what's the best management? My BGL are on average 5-6mmol. Thanks for reading and any advice in advance!

 

[lizdeluz]

Welcome to the forum!
Exercise can sometimes raise your blood sugar. After a swim, my blood sugar increases to 10 from 5 but then drops lower than 5 later in the day, I used to worry about it, but now I expect this effect, and I try not to overtreat the high blood sugar. However, I do try to mitigate the effect: I might give myself 1 or 1.5 units of fast-acting when I'm relaxing after my swim, depending on what my meter is telling me. Tricky, though. I think the only answer is to monitor how exercise affects you personally, and be ready for it, rather than not do the exercise. Exercise is good, though it can muck up the figures for a short while.

 

[isjoberg]

I use a rough approximation to figure out exactly when my blood sugar will drop. If I just attended a 20 min HIIT class, my blood sugar will be high afterwards, but will drop quite quickly within an hour (so twice the length of the class). However if I have gone for a slow steady state run that has lasted 1.5hrs, then I would expect my blood sugar to still be potentially coming down quite dramatically up to 3hrs later (I know it affects for over 24hrs but this is what I think about). I always try to time my meals to half an hour after exercise, because then when it begins to go low, or I've injected to correct for a high, I will be eating rather than chasing a hypo and overcorrecting!

Summary - time your meals for after exercise so if your blood sugar is high you can inject for the meal to bring it down and not risk going hypo as you are about to eat soon.

 

[therower]

Hi @Kellyjay08. Had very similar incident just this afternoon.
Had lunch at noon, checked sugars at 2.30 prior to going to the gym.
Sugars 8.8 so happy to go gym.
Did a heavier than planned weights workout for an hour, pushed myself further than usual.
Checked sugars prior to dinner at 5.00 to find I was at 15.8. This is something that occasionally happens to me when I push myself over a certain limit, what that limit is I really can't say, I could do the same workout tomorrow and be around 8.0 or less.
I don't worry to much about it i just do correction dose next meal time.
As I say this is a seldom occurrence for me. If you find it happens a lot to you then maybe keeping a record of food eaten, insulin amounts and type of exercise to see if a pattern emerges. Also check your sugars during your workout you may find you need some carbs during your workout to keep you stable and avoid your liver doing a dump.
Do keep training though and don't worry.