Exercise

dwelldon

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Quick question, although I exercise lots my current blood sugars are always high.

What are the best types of exercise in bringing down blood sugar
 

Melgar

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Hi there @dwelldon , everyone is different when it comes to blood sugars. I am a fitness junkie. So to answer your question I would say resistance training, such as weights. Anything in a gym environment where your muscles are challenged. Of course, I’m not suggesting that the gym is the only place, but just to give you an idea when you look around at the Type of equipment in a gym you will see people exercising different parts of the body to the point where your muscles fail. It is exercising your muscles to the point of failure that possibly would achieve the biggest results over time. It will likely bring down insulin resistance and your blood sugars, but you would see short duration rises, due to stress and the release if cortisol, but over time it will make a difference.
You may get other answers, but that is my personal view.
 

Jasmin2000

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I do different exercises depending on how much I've eaten or how much I want to drop my BG. A brisk walk of 1.5 miles drops 2 mmol/L (and is the distance to the coffee shop).

Exercise bike at high speed for 30 min is another 2 mmol/L but the same distance over 2 hours doesn't move my BG at all. As @Melgar said, you need to challenge your muscles.

If I'm around 4 mmol/L, I can actually raise BG by 1 mmol/L if I do 100 sit-ups - anaerobic exercise tends to give you a liver dump, at least in the first round.
 

KennyA

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Quick question, although I exercise lots my current blood sugars are always high.

What are the best types of exercise in bringing down blood sugar
If you read around the various replies to this and similar questions on the forum, you'll see a number of different and contradictory replies. My take on this is that we each seem to respond differently to different sorts of activity, and that might be because of the relative effort or exertion. For me it seems to have something to do with adrenaline.

Personally, I notice that strenuous exercise accompanied by adrenaline - an hour playing football, for example - will put my BG up (short term). If I want to lower current BG I need to do a lot of slow non-adrenaline boring heavy lifting - digging is the best example of this for me. That's also short term. Once the effort stops, my liver will fairly quickly - within minutes - start bringing me back to somewhere between 4.7 and 5.4 mmol/l, which is where it seems to have decided I should be.

I would advise trying various exercises and finding out. If you're like me, you'll probably need a CGM to really see what the trends are. I found that fingerprick testing couldn't really capture the ups and downs.
 
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Antje77

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Quick question, although I exercise lots my current blood sugars are always high.

What are the best types of exercise in bringing down blood sugar
How high are you going?
Are you still suspected of having T1 rather than T2?

Exercise, apart from just taking a walk is not recommended with blood glucose in the high teens or higher, especially not if you're not T2.
Strenuous exercise with already high BG increases the risk of ketoacidosis.
 

dwelldon

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How high are you going?
Are you still suspected of having T1 rather than T2?

Exercise, apart from just taking a walk is not recommended with blood glucose in the high teens or higher, especially not if you're not T2.
Strenuous exercise with already high BG increases the risk of ketoacidosis.
I.am T2. At the moment my sugar levels are averaging between 8 and 15. I don't seem to be able to get them lower. New drugs don't appear to be as effective.
 
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Jo123

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I find exercise fairly ineffective and I do weights and aerobic, I find being generally active all day better.
And u day this currently trialling a cgm.
I was pre diabetic now normal but I have to work at it.
 

SimonP78

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Exercise, apart from just taking a walk is not recommended with blood glucose in the high teens or higher, especially not if you're not T2.
Strenuous exercise with already high BG increases the risk of ketoacidosis.
The recommendations are very conservative though, as long as you have some insulin on board then there is no problem. I used to walk to reduce blood glucose (even with just basal onboard) and I now tend to sit on the turbo trainer at a low-ish power (~60% of FTP) for 30min to reduce BG if I'm running high. If I'm doing a long ride I don't worry too much about spiking high due to nerves/stopping too long for lunch etc. - I'm also not happy about it, but I certainly won't stop because of it.
 
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Antje77

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The recommendations are very conservative though, as long as you have some insulin on board then there is no problem.
I think it's highly individual and mainly depending on how prone to DKA you are. Some T1's slip into DKA very easily and with relatively low bg, even with IOB. I don't have any experience with DKA myself, thankfully.
Just recently I read a very informative article on the mechanisms of how exercise with high bg increases the risk of DKA but now I can't find it, and I don't remember enough to try to explain. It did make a lot of sense to me when I read the explanation though.
However, this is pretty much off topic on this thread by a member who has a now confirmed T2 diagnosis and the highs go to mid teens, not a HI reading on the meter.
 

erikame

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The recommendations are very conservative though, as long as you have some insulin on board then there is no problem. I used to walk to reduce blood glucose (even with just basal onboard) and I now tend to sit on the turbo trainer at a low-ish power (~60% of FTP) for 30min to reduce BG if I'm running high.
If I'm doing a long ride I don't worry too much about spiking high due to nerves/stopping too long for lunch etc. - I'm also not happy about it, but I certainly won't stop because of it.
By the way, speaking of balancing, if you're interested in eSports and streaming platforms, BetBazar offers some great insights into how these platforms are evolving, and how they can impact fan engagement and performance metrics
I know how difficult it is to balance physical activity and glucose levels. Short jogs help my husband.
 
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SimonP78

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I think it's highly individual and mainly depending on how prone to DKA you are. Some T1's slip into DKA very easily and with relatively low bg, even with IOB. I don't have any experience with DKA myself, thankfully.
While I've also heard of such people, it would be interesting to to know quite how easily this happens, and whether they do in fact exist at all/how prevalent this is in reality.

Just recently I read a very informative article on the mechanisms of how exercise with high bg increases the risk of DKA but now I can't find it, and I don't remember enough to try to explain. It did make a lot of sense to me when I read the explanation though.
If you do I'd be interested to have a read - see also my linky at the bottom.

However, this is pretty much off topic on this thread by a member who has a now confirmed T2 diagnosis and the highs go to mid teens, not a HI reading on the meter.

But mid-teens is exactly where people often say they've been told not to exercise (whether T1 or presumably T2). If your meter is off-scale high (which for mine would be >24mmol/l iirc, then I completely agree you do need to know what you're doing and determine why you're so high and whether exercise is in fact a good idea. Though with that said walking can never hurt.)

I don't know what the recommendations are for a T2 and whether there is a potential for a lack of insulin and therefore DKA, but I think in many ways the picture is clearer if you're T1 (and not on a pump) at least you know how much insulin you've given yourself (with pump blockages being a potential problem for those using them). As with all things diabetes related, YMMV.

This link is regarding T1s rather than T2s, but might be of interest:
 
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VashtiB

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Quick question, although I exercise lots my current blood sugars are always high.

What are the best types of exercise in bringing down blood sugar
As previous posters have said it seems to vary widely from one person to another. You may want to consider self funding a CGM and using the 2 weeks to experiment. This may give you some ideas about how your body reacts to different activities.

Good luck.
 
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SimonP78

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I forgot to answer the original question too.

There is a trade-off, higher intensity aerobic exercise will use carbs faster, but you can't maintain this level of exertion for as long as lower intensity aerobic exercise and also your body will tend to release more exercise-related stress hormones, which cause the liver to convert stored glycogen into glucose. If you can maintain high intensity aerobic exercise for long enough (an hour or more) your liver will run low on glycogen and/or your hormone response will abate and the hepatic glucose generation will taper away. You will then start running low even while doing high intensity exercise, which at the start may well have made you run high. Anaerobic exercise is a limiting case of the above, you really can't do this type of exercise for any significant duration of time and definitely get a hepatic glucose response.

There is also an increase of insulin sensitivity with exercise, both acutely while you exercise and also after you have been exercising. I don't know whether there's research looking at how insulin sensitivity changes with exercise type/duration and how these effect the duration of post-exercise muscle insulin sensitivity, but I would guess it's a combination of duration and work done (i.e. power expended) as a proxy for glucose requirement, which is the underlying goal of the sensitivity changes. The post-exercise sensitivity may be a tapering of the former effect but certainly also has some relation to how much glucose needs to be reabsorbed to replenish muscle (and liver) glycogen stocks. Even very low intensity exercise ("fat burning") still burns carbs, though I don't know how this affects insulin sensitivity. It's probably quite hard to pick apart as when I ride at this intensity it's for a long time so I definitely used quite a lot of carbs as well as burning fat. There is probably some research somewhere.

So to get an immediate reduction in blood glucose the ideal exercise is one which burns as much energy as possible without producing any stress response. Walking, mowing the lawn, gardening, etc., are more effective from that point of view than riding a bike is for me, though that may well be because I habitually ride too fast! If I sit inside on the turbo trainer at a reasonably low power for 30min I can get my BG to drop precipitously, but it's very hard to ride like that outside.

Another interesting effect related to habituation is that I find if I've not been doing much riding (it's generally cold and wet outside right now and I've had a lurgie) my post-exercise response is massive (my dawn phenomenon will be gone for a couple of days and I'll run low overnight even after a reasonable 80km round-trip commute) whereas in the summer when I ride much more I'd barely even notice any change in BG after a ride like that. There is probably an optimal level of and interval between exercise for a diabetic such that the gaps are long enough to elicit a decent increase in insulin sensitivity without the body becoming habituated to it (which would also have the beneficial effect of avoiding overtraining/wearing yourself out!)

Experiments to be done once the weather improves (though at that point it's quite hard to take multi-day long breaks between rides as it's nice out :))