Day 4: Exercise For Effortless Blood Sugar Control: How Much and What Type

Day 4: Exercise For Effortless Blood Sugar Control: How Much and What Type

By Cyrus Khambatta, Ph.D.

In yesterday’s lesson we learned why developing high quality muscle tissue is your key to a healthy life as a diabetic.  The crux of the argument was this: high quality muscle tissue is HUNGRY for glucose, and does a great job of vacuuming glucose out of the bloodstream. 

We’ve all heard the adage that exercise is good for you.  In fact, many researchers (including myself) go so far as to say that exercise is the single most powerful drug known to man.  And the support for this statement is easy to find.  Exercise benefits every organ in your body, large to small.  Here are a few benefits of exercise:

Effect	Tissue
Increased lean body mass	Muscle
Reduced fat mass	Adipose (fat) tissue
Lower resting heart rate	Heart
Lower cholesterol levels	Blood vessels
Reduced blood pressure	Blood vessels
Increased memory formation	Pituitary gland (brain)
Reduced depression	Brain
Improved digestive function	Small intestine, large intestine, pancreas, liver

There is a lot of confusion on what exercises to perform and how much to perform for increased health.  It seems like every few years the research changes, from time-intensive cardiovascular exercise to short-duration cardiovascular exercise to high intensity interval training (HIIT). 

The benefits of exercise on the human body hasn’t changed, it’s just that our understanding of how exercise affects our body is constantly evolving.

Cardiovascular Exercise

Cardiovascular training is sometimes called aerobic exercise.  This is the world’s most popular form of exercise, mainly because it can be performed without any equipment.  You don’t even need shoes. You simply need to move.  It doesn’t matter how you move, just that you do it continuously to get your heart pumping fast.   

The benefits of cardiovascular training are massive, and occur all throughout your body.  Your heart is the muscle that performs the bulk of the work, hence the name cardiovascular.  Don’t be fooled, your heart is a muscle, however it is constructed slightly differently than the muscles supporting the rest of your skeleton, mainly because it acts like a pump to circulate blood.  

Cardiovascular exercise strengthens the force with which your heart contracts (also called cardiac output).  Stronger beats mean that with each beat, your heart is capable of pumping a larger volume of blood.  If more blood is being pumped per beat, then your heart can beat fewer times to pump the same amount of blood.  That’s why your resting heart rate decreases over time, because your strengthening heart is doing more work with each beat.  In addition, cardiovascular exercise increases the number and cross sectional area of the blood vessels in your heart, in order to provide your heart with larger amounts of blood. 

Frequent cardiovascular exercise trains your heart to pump more blood through the rest of the body, and to pump blood to itself.  Genius.

Cardiovascular exercise (e.g. walking, jogging, running, swimming and cycling) also strengthen skeletal muscles throughout your body.  After all, those are the muscles that are doing the work.  Because cardiovascular exercise can be performed for long periods of time, large muscle groups are usually the major contributors.  As an example, a runner contracts muscles in their calf, quadriceps, hamstring, butt (gluteus), core and lower back with EVERY step.  Over the course of thousands of steps, each of those muscle groups perform work continuously.  Together, this results in a large quantity of overall work.  

Simply stated, cardiovascular exercise burns calories.  Lots of calories.  You may have noticed the last time you did cardiovascular exercise that you got very tired and perhaps slept well that same night.  Often this occurs because the amount of energy you burned in the process of moving large muscle groups was quite high.  Overall, this is a great thing, especially if you are overweight. 

                                                         Losing weight starts by burning calories.                     

Resistance Exercise

Resistance training is the type of movement in which your body is resisting an external force.  The external force can be a weight set, another person, or your own body.  In most cases, gravity provides the force; opposing that force is what leads to muscle growth over time. 

Most people think that resistance exercise requires an expensive gym membership, spending time lifting weights or lifting heavy objects.  This is a misnomer.  Resistance exercise can be performed without a single weight, and can be performed using only your body as a weight (hence the term bodyweight exercise).  

Over the past 20 years, the exercise world has gone through a massive revolution, and innovative trainers have developed a large list of fun and creative bodyweight movements that are sure to keep you challenged at all levels of athleticism.  It turns out that some of the strongest athletes on the planet NEVER lift weights in a gym.  By manipulating the position of their body, they are able to create resistance to preserve and grow muscle.  

The most important thing you should know about resistance exercise is this:

Resistance exercise preserves (and even grows) muscle mass, which is an essential aspect of becoming a diabetic health machine.  Preserving muscle mass will keep the billions of mitochondria in your muscle hungry for glucose, amino acids and fatty acids, keeping the strength of the glucose vacuum high. 

In order to become a diabetic health machine it is imperative to perform exercise that preserves muscle mass, and even increases it in exchange for fat mass.  When muscle tissue is given the stimulus to grow (even in small amounts), it becomes very hungry for nutrients, including nutrients that are already stored on your body.  True, the nutrients you eat will feed your increasingly hungry muscle tissue, but by preserving muscle mass you also gain the ability to breakdown the fat stored all around your body.  

This is great news for diabetics, for a number of reasons:

Preserving muscle mass burns fat mass already stored on your body

Reduced fat mass kick starts the weight loss process

Reduced fat mass increases the action of insulin

Increased insulin action means increased insulin sensitivity

How Much Exercise Is Necessary?

The question how much exercise is necessary to be healthy? is an age old question that modern science has now attempted to tackle.  Researchers have investigated the effects of exercise type, duration, intensity, and frequency, and have come up with a wide range of answers to describe the optimal exercise program.  It’s great that we’ve put our best and brightest to the test.  The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a consensus.  

Some of the most compelling research I’ve ever read came from studies involving thousands of ordinary people looking to look and feel better.  The study participants were not particularly athletic; they were simply adults looking for better health through diet and exercise.  It turns out that the people who got the best results were the ones that exercised for 5 hours per week on average, and split their workouts 50-50 between cardiovascular and resistance exercise.  That’s it, just 5 hours per week.  

Most people think that only doing aerobic exercise will get the job done, and that resistance training is only for bodybuilders.  This mentality could not be farther from the truth.

By performing only cardiovascular exercise, you run the risk of losing muscle mass.  That’s because cardiovascular exercise does not stimulate the muscle to grow nearly to the extent that resistance training does.  Therefore, your body will hold on to exactly the amount of muscle required to do aerobic exercise, and nothing more.  The worst part is that muscles not directly involved in the exercise itself will get smaller over time and lose both their strength and their hunger.  And if you’re overweight, then losing muscle mass will certainly not help you lose weight. 

If you are overweight, losing muscle mass by performing ONLY cardiovascular exercise will stunt your ability to lose weight. 

Performing ONLY cardiovascular exercise has the following effects:

Reduced muscle mass

Reduced ability to burn fat

Poor muscle tone and shape

Depressed metabolism

Reduced glucose vacuum

Performing ONLY resistance exercise has the following effects:

Increased muscle mass

Improved muscle tone and shape

Small changes in fat mass

Limited heart involvement

Poor endurance

Small changes in metabolism

Small changes in glucose vacuum

The Exercise Double Whammy

By supplementing cardiovascular exercise with equal amounts of resistance exercise, you get the exercise double whammy: ravenously hungry muscle tissue and an incredibly strong heart.  Performing either aerobic or resistance exercise in isolation doesn’t have nearly the effect of the two together.  In the PDF handout that comes with this lesson, you’ll find a few exercise routines that work muscles all over your body, ensuring that you develop hungry muscle tissue everywhere.  These routines mix together cardiovascular and resistance exercise, and are sure to keep the strength of your glucose vacuum high at all times. 

Ease Yourself into an Exercise Program

One mistake that many people make is trying to hit the 5-hours-of-exercise-per-week target immediately.  This can be a huge mistake, especially if you have not exercised recently.  When it comes to exercise, consistency is the key to achieving the body you want and developing a consistent muscle hunger that will keep your blood sugar in check.  So depending on your current state of physical activity, use the following table as a guide for increasing your exercise frequency to the 5-hours-per-week goal:

Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	Week 5
Exercise 1 hour	Exercise 2 hours	Exercise 3 hours	Exercise 4 hours	Exercise 5 hours
30 min resistance	1 hour resistance	2 hours resistance	2 hours resistance	3 hours resistance
30 min cardio	1 hour cardio	1 hour cardio	2 hours cardio	2 hours cardio

If You Do Not Currently Exercise

If you do not exercise at all, start by achieving 1 hour per week of exercise divided between 30 minutes of resistance exercise and 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise.  You can perform them as individual sessions on separate days.

If You Currently Exercise Even A Little

If you’re already exercising regularly, then find the column that best describes the total number of hours that you perform.  As an example, if you perform 2 hours of exercise per week on average, then locate the column that says “Week 2: exercise 2 hours.”  That’s your starting point.  Start by performing 2 hours of exercise this week, divided between 1 hour of resistance exercise and 1 hour of cardiovascular exercise.  Next week, add 1 more hour of total exercise.  The following week, add 1 more hour.  Repeat this process until you achieve 5 hours of total exercise, divided between 3 hours of resistance exercise and 2 hours of cardio exercise.

Progressive Resistance

When it comes to exercise, the name of the game is progressive resistance.  I’ll define the term as follows:

Progressive Resistance: the method of gradually increasing the difficulty of an exercise session by increasing either the duration or intensity.

The idea is simple.  When you exercise, you stimulate muscle tissue to move in a specific manner.  In response to those repeated movements, the muscle tissue adapts by changing it’s size, shape, and function.  Over time, muscle tissue adapts perfectly to the exercise you perform, at which point the exercise is no longer considered difficult.  Incorporating progressive resistance into your regimen means that on a weekly basis, you challenge yourself to work slightly more than the week before.  So if today you can run a mile in 8 minutes and 30 seconds, next week aim to run a mile in 8 minutes and 20 seconds.  The following week aim to run a mile in 8 minutes and 15 seconds.  Changing your workout goals by seemingly tiny amounts like this continually challenges your muscle tissue to remodel, grow, and adapt to increasing levels of stress.  

By incorporating progressive resistance into your workout regimen, you will not only achieve a better body in a shorter period of time, but begin to reverse the effects of insulin resistance quickly.  By continually challenging muscle tissue all throughout your body, you not only maintain high quality muscle tissue over time, you stimulate the muscle tissue to continuously vacuum glucose out of the bloodstream to satisfy a large appetite.  

Your magic number for progressive resistance is 5%.  That’s it.  That means that on a weekly basis, if you can increase your challenge by 5%, in a short period of time you will notice significant change in the way you feel, and an improved ability to control blood sugar all throughout the day.  Let’s take another example – this time for a resistance exercise like pushups.  Suppose that in your current workout, you can perform a total of 60 pushups this week.  Next week, aim to do 5% more pushups, for a total of 63.  The following week, aim to do 5% more pushups, for a total of 66.  The following week, aim to do 5% more pushups, for a total of 70.  And so on.  By adding 5% more effort to your exercise regimen, you will turbo-charge your workout regimen and prevent yourself from plateauing. 

Soreness

Soreness is your best indicator of an effective progressive resistance regimen.  The feeling of soreness happens when muscle tissue is actively repairing itself.  You’ve probably experienced this feeling before, after doing something that you hadn’t done for a long time. 

Soreness is your muscles’ way of saying, “Hey, that work you did was hard.  Now I’m restructuring myself in order to prepare for more.” 

At the cellular level, there is a TON going on when a muscle tissue is progressively challenged.  Here are a few of the changes that occur in an actively challenged muscle tissue:

(1)    Mitochondria are multiplying in order to gain the ability to process larger quantities of oxygen and burn more fuel

(2)    Glycogen stores are being replenished, in order to refill and grow the carbohydrate storage tank

(3)    Muscle fibers undergo micro-tears that need to be stitched back together stronger to withstand more force

(4)    Waste products generated during exercise are being cleared from the extracellular fluid and fresh nutrients are being recruited to the muscle tissue to fuel the repair process

(5)    The connective tissue surrounding the muscle (mainly fascia and ligaments) are also being remodeled in order to accommodate a growing muscle tissue

(6)    Nerves within the muscle gain the ability to communicate with more cells in the muscle tissue to increase the strength of muscle contraction

The combination of all of the factors (and more) result in a feeling of soreness that often takes between 24-48 hours to go away.  That is about the length of time that a healthy muscle tissue takes to repair itself in preparation for the next round of exercise.  Of course, if the muscle was worked way beyond it’s capabilities, then the feeling of soreness can last for 1 week or more.  This is a condition called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS), which can be very dangerous and even deadly.  Our goal is to stimulate the muscle tissue to work harder by 5% per week, which results in only small feelings of soreness that are an indicator of an effective progressive resistance program.