Richard 2024
Member
Asking for some real world guidance is a reasonable request, but one that in my experience does seem to be beyond the relevant authorities. This applies to a range of conditions, although there does seem to be a glimmer of hope that things may be moving in the right direction.
With glucose and the body, there is actually very little in the blood, about a teaspoon’s worth generally speaking, and not a huge amount in storage either. Glucose is stored in the muscle cells and in the liver too, and that’s about it.
That gives 3 choices of what to do when glucose levels are higher than you’d like them to be.
- Stop adding to what’s already there – low carb eating.
- Use up what is already there – exercise and daily activity.
- Find a way to store more glucose so it’s kept out of the blood,
For option 2, how the body produces energy determines how much glucose gets used. Fat and glucose are the main fuels for exercise, fat producing energy slowly, but for a long time, glucose producing it quickly, but for a shorter amount of time.
This is why you can’t sprint a marathon, you can’t produce the energy required to power a sprint level effort for more than a few minutes.
In reality, both fuels are being used all the time, but the proportion at which each is used alters depending how quickly energy needs to be produced.
When exercising at slower, steadier efforts like a walk, energy can be created at a slower sustainable rate, so there’s no need for the liver to release extra glucose. Test readings still drop though, as glucose will be used, just in smaller amounts.
For efforts where a lot of energy needs to be created quickly, the muscles will burn through glucose quickly. In turn, this sends a message to the liver that more is likely to be needed, so it releases glucose into the blood stream; this is the spike in glucose levels that people notice when they test.
I must say here, that this spike is a perfectly normal response to higher intensity exercise, that occurs with everyone, whether diabetic or not.
This study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3587394/ looks at the effect of High Intensity Exercise on glucose levels during and post exercise.
The findings were that yes, HIE does raise blood glucose levels during the exercise bout (as you’d expect), but lowers it for 24 hours afterwards.
Furthermore, a 2 week programme of sprints (which is very little time really), reduced the average blood glucose level by 13% at 48 to 72 hours after exercise and also increased GLUT4 (one of the transporters that takes glucose into the muscle) by 369%.
So both longer/slower exercise and shorter/faster exercise lower blood glucose, but at different rates and for different time periods.
Option 3, is increasing the amount of glucose your body can store, which means increasing the size of the store cupboard.
As said earlier, it’s mainly the liver and skeletal muscle that store glucose; enlarging the liver probably isn’t a good idea, which leaves increasing the size of your muscles, which is where some form of resistance training comes in.
This doesn’t mean becoming a bodybuilder, think of it more like athletic training to improve ability for sport.
It doesn’t really matter what type of resistance (bodyweight, machines, free weights), as long as the muscles get worked, you can progress the work you do, and most importantly, you enjoy it.
So, the answer is that all of them work as management tools and all are different, complimentary parts of an overall fitness plan.
They don’t all need to be used at the same time either, and particularly with “endurance” type activities, with an increasing intensity scale of 1 to 10, people often only consider using 1 or 10, ignoring efforts in between, all of which add value; it’s often the range of intensities that work the magic.
You have my apologies if you’ve gotten this far. If it was too waffly, feel free to ask for clarifications.