Exercises to Lower Blood Glucose Levels

If you have diabetes, your doctor probably has told you that you should incorporate exercise into your life to help lower your blood glucose levels. Exercise plays a very important role in managing your diabetes, and it should be part of your day, every day. You may not know what types of exercises are the most beneficial to help lower your blood sugar levels, but some forms of exercise will give you better results than others.

Exercise and Diabetes

• Exercise has benefits that reach beyond its physical aspects. It is crucial for certain medical conditions, including type II diabetes. For people with type I diabetes, however, exercise alone has not shown to help radically. As a matter of fact, with type I diabetes, blood sugar may drop too low when exercise is combined with medication and cause hypoglycemia. It is still important to get exercise if you have type I diabetes, but it is also important that you have your exercise and your diabetes monitored closely by your physician. On the other hand, with type II diabetes, exercise plays a very big role in managing blood glucose levels. It is very important to incorporate exercise as part of your daily routine to help manage your type II diabetes.

Aerobic Workouts

• The best type of exercise is aerobic exercise. It, however, should be approved by your physician, due to possible medical problems, such as heart vascular disease or hypoglycemic issues of which you may be unaware. If you get approval from your doctor to start an aerobic workout, your workout exercises should total 20 to 40 minutes on a daily basis.

  You can combine aerobic exercises to get optimum results, such as swimming and jogging, or biking and swimming. You could take an aerobics class a couple of times a week, and on the days you are not doing aerobics, you could do a fast-paced walk around your neighborhood. You should also rotate exercises, such as doing sit-ups first, then chin-ups and end with push-ups.

  Because aerobic exercises increase your heart rate, you have a number of options and combinations of options. If you like to dance, you could take a dance class a few times a week and do a different aerobic exercise on the other days. Keeping a strict regimen of exercise is extremely important if you are diabetic to help you maintain your blood sugar levels in a healthy range.

Weightlifting

• Weightlifting is another good exercise for diabetics. You can take a weight-training class at a gym or do weightlifting at home. The build-up of muscle mass acquired through lifting weights lowers your insulin resistance, and this helps your blood sugar control as well as increases your weight loss.

  The idea behind weightlifting is that after a good workout, your muscles will break down over the next 24 hours. They will then turn around and build up for the following 24 hours. This is called anaerobic exercising. This is an ideal way to not only build muscle mass but help keep your blood sugar at lower levels as well.