High Intensity Exercise Cuts Diabetes Risk

Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Quick Tips, Seniors/fit, Sports, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | (0) Comments

Most people who workout hard never, ever have a problem with diabetes. So this study (linked over at MPF) is not really shocking, but does shed some light on why…

Regular exercise can help reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Many people feel they simply don’t have the time to follow current exercise guidelines, and that’s unfortunate, he says, because his team found that “doing a few intense muscle exercises, each lasting only about 30 seconds, dramatically improves your metabolism in just two weeks.” Current recommendations include 2.5 hours of moderate-intensity activity a week.

His team found that “low-volume, high-intensity training … substantially improved both insulin action and glucose clearance in otherwise sedentary young males.”

That shows that “we do not yet fully appreciate the traditional connection between exercise and diabetes,” Timmons says.

The test subjects used exercise bikes to perform quick, rigorous sprints for 30 seconds totaling 15 minutes over a two-week period. The participants were either sedentary or recreationally active, but none was in a structured exercise program.

“This novel approach may help people to lead a healthier life, improve the future health of the population, and save the health service millions of pounds [or dollars] simply by making it easier for people to find the time to exercise.”

The key principle is pretty simple, but I think it goes further, i.e. body composition has a huge effect on how we metabolize foods. People with a high muscle content vs fat metabolize food differently than sedentary overweight people. I suspect that in addition to the insulin sensitivity and glucose clearing effect that intense exercise has on metabolism, muscle mass has a big effect on these factors because of increased base (resting) metabolism. Add the 2 together and you have a cure for diabetes. But of course we already know that. The problem is how you get people to do high intensity exercise when you can’t even get them to walk around the block once a day. Sigh…