How Does Exercise Affect My Diabetes?

: How does exercise affect my diabetes?

Exercise is good for everyone, whether you have diabetes or not, and for a person with diabetes it's even more important because what exercise does is it lets sugar go into the muscle, even if insulin doesn't work normally. You know people with type-two diabetes are insulin resistant. People with type-one diabetes are insulin deficient. So in both cases, the muscle doesn't get as much signal from the insulin molecule. But when you exercise the muscle starts to take up glucose even if you have no insulin or you are insulin resistant. So exercise is good.

People with diabetes need to monitor their sugars before and after their exercise to make sure their sugars stay in the normal range, particularly if they exercise very vigorously, like jogging, or you know running a marathon or doing other very strenuous sports. I think that's part of it.

The second part of exercise of course is it helps improve your long term sensitivity. It's not just during the exercise but if you're physically conditioned your body is more sensitive to insulin. This is part of a way to help prevent diabetes for people at risk. So that it has this long term benefit, and of course it has the cardiovascular benefit that if you exercise enough to bring your pulse rate up then you're also getting cardiac benefit from it. Of course, that's beneficial for everyone as well.