Exercise For Diabetes

Even the experts were surprised by the comparison between walking and running just reported in the American Heart Association journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology. Since I am a reformed jogger and am now a dedicated walker, the results delighted me and I think that they will make a lot of other people who have diabetes happy and healthy.

The difference with the new study is that it compared the number of miles we cover, not the amount of time we move. The study concluded that walking briskly can lower our risk of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes as much as running can.

“Walking and running provide an ideal test of the health benefits of moderate-intensity walking and vigorous-intensity running because they involve the same muscle groups and the same activities performed at different intensities,” says Paul T. Williams, Ph.D., the study’s principal author. He is also a staff scientist in the life science division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

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Would you rather SIT or HIT?

SIT sounds like it’s too passive and HIT sounds too aggressive. But they are actually acronyms for intense forms of activity that can help us to better health and fitness in a fraction of the time that current exercise programs recommend.

SIT is Sprint Interval Training. HIT is High Intensity Interval Training (because HIIT is harder to say).

Sprint Interval Training means going all out in 30 second sprints on special laboratory bikes interspersed with four and one-half minutes of slow cycling. If you are young and healthy, this is probably the fastest way for you to get fit.

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Physical activities like walking, hiking, running, and swimming are better than resistance training for burning fat, according to a new study. The study by researchers from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, is the largest randomized trial that ever analyzed changes in our body composition from the three main ways that we get exercise.

These ways are (1) aerobic training — the activities like walking, hiking, running, and swimming, (2) resistance training like weight lifting, and (3) a combination of these two. In the conventional wisdom people had believed that increased metabolism from resistance training alone could reduce our body mass or fat mass, but the study found that it didn’t.

The study, “Effects of aerobic and/or resistance training on body mass and fat mass in
overweight or obese adults,” appears in the December 15 issue of the Journal of Applied Physiology. Only the abstract of the study is online, but the lead author, Leslie H. Willis, kindly sent me the full-text. He is the clinical research coordinator at Duke Medical Center – Cardiology.

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When we think about managing our diabetes, we are almost always considering what we eat. Many of us rely on diabetes medications to stay in control. Some of us keep our blood glucose levels low with exercise.

But we rarely consider how our minds and bodies interact. We seldom think about how stress in our minds can make our bodies feel bad. When we feel bad, we sometimes overeat, don’t take our medication, or fail to get the exercise we need.

When it comes to stress, less is better, at least up to a point. Less stress means less tasks to do, fewer distractions and possessions to have, and even less civilization to live in. We need a new focus on “Less stress is beautiful” to go beyond the previous century’s “small is beautiful” movement.

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Most people say they don’t have enough time to get the exercise that the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association say we need to protect our hearts and manage our diabetes. Their standard recommendation of 30 minutes a day five times a week works out to 2 ½ hours a week. And that doesn’t count the time it takes to get to the trail or the gym.

When we work one or more full-time jobs, interact with our family and friends, relax and sleep a little, we often feel like we don’t have any time left to work out. If only we could find a shortcut!

Now, however, some researchers have the answer. By trading intensity for time we can much more efficiently get the physical activity we all need.

The trick is a new twist on the interval training that almost all competitive athletics use to build up their speed and endurance. The usual interval training combines bursts of high-intensity exercise with longer periods of regular intensity exercise. A former girlfriend who is both a Certified Diabetes Educator and an athlete taught me that several years ago, and I recommended it then in “Efficient Exercise for Glucose Control.”

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When Dr. Bob Sallis called me, he was standing in line at an airport. I was sitting down.

My mistake.

We had scheduled an interview for this article about walking. But the message that he wanted to get out was both about walking and sitting.

“Some of the recent studies are showing that if you sit the rest of the day after exercise you negate the benefits of your exercise,” Dr. Sallis told me. “You have to be conscious of too much sitting.”

One of my wives once told me, only half in jest, that she never stands when she could sit and never sits when she could lie down. That’s only a slight exaggeration of what most of us have become.

I used to sit as much as my late wife did. But last year when I learned that “Standing Helps Heart Health,” I finally got my act together. Soon, I got a desk where I can work standing up.

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