Weight Training May Benefit Diabetics : Health: Studies indicate that doctor-supervised weightlifting could aid the body’s processing of insulin in non-insulin- dependent patients.
Lifting weights may help to control the most common form of diabetes, researchers say.
Two studies indicate that weight training aids the body in making more efficient use of the insulin it produces, which could fight development or worsening of non-insulin-dependent diabetes. This condition is estimated to account for about 90% of diabetes.
In non-insulin-dependent diabetes, the pancreas’ insulin-producing cells do not work well enough to produce the hormone in amounts needed, and the body is not able to break down enough glucose, a sugar that cells need for fuel.
Especially in its early stages, this form of diabetes usually can be controlled by diet and exercise under a doctor’s supervision.
Aerobic exercise, which burns glycogen, a form of glucose that is stored in muscles, is the type of exercise typically recommended. But reports in the American Physiological Society’s Journal of Applied Physiology add to evidence that weight training works as well.
“It’s probably an effect on muscle,” said researcher Matthew S. Hickey of East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. “Insulin will bind to muscle and tell it to take up the glucose from the blood.”
While he was at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., Hickey worked on one of the journal studies. In this project, researchers looked at 17 people, seven of whom were diabetes patients. The diabetes patients averaged 53 years of age, not unusual in a disease that typically does not manifest itself until after 30. Of the healthy subjects, seven were around 27 and the rest were around 51.
The subjects were tested to see the maximum amount of weight they could lift at one try, and were later given a workout, based on their maximums, that would be strenuous enough to leave them tired. Before the one-time maximal lifts and the workout, the subjects drank 75 grams of glucose.
Eighteen hours after the workout, diabetic and non-diabetic patients both showed a decrease in total insulin response with no change in the amount of glucose in the blood, the report said. This indicates the body was able to use insulin more efficiently after exercise in holding the glucose level steady, the study says.
Using exercise to make the body more insulin-efficient could help to counter the progression of diabetes, Hickey said. In the condition’s early stages, the body typically responds to an oversupply of glucose by stimulating overproduction of insulin, which burns out the pancreatic cells that make the hormone. This creates an insulin shortage later.
The changes are about what would be expected for a single session of aerobic exercise, Hickey said. But this is the first study to see such changes for a single session of weight training, the study reported.
In a separate report, researchers at the University of Maryland and the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center found that strength training increased insulin action and lowered insulin levels in the blood of healthy men ages 50 to 65.
The change was “as good as you get with aerobic exercise training,” said Dr. Richard E. Pratley, diabetes researcher with the National Institutes of Health in Phoenix.
While Hickey and Pratley see advantages to weight training, they also see it as something that should be done with a doctor’s approval in addition to, not instead of, aerobics. Hickey suggests that weight training be structured for them like aerobics, with low weight levels and high numbers of repetitions.
Weight training performed improperly can boost blood pressure, and high blood pressure is a problem for diabetics, Hickey said. Pratley is especially concerned about the possible effects on the eye, because blindness is a common result of diabetes.
