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In addition to aerobic activities, you can greatly improve your blood glucose by doing some resistance, or weight, training. Like so many systems in the body, if you don’t use all your muscle fibers, you lose them over time.

One in three Americans has diabetes or prediabetes. You would think that finding a fitness professional—a personal trainer, physical therapist, or other allied fitness and health trainer—who knows enough about diabetes to be helpful rather than harmful would not be that hard, right? Think again.

Without properly functioning joints, our bodies would be unable to bend, flex, or even move. A joint is wherever two bones come together, held in place by tendons that cross the joint and attach muscles to a bone on the other side and ligaments that attach to bones on both sides of the joint to stabilize it.

As an exercise physiologist, I first and foremost focus on the physical activity part for management of blood glucose levels, often stating that being active will increase insulin action, lower blood glucose levels, and make diabetes management easier. In reality, not all of those benefits are fully evident in many cases. In fact, they usually cannot be counted on unless you take into account myriad other factors that can have an equally—if not more—dramatic effect on blood glucose management.

by Sheri Colberg, Ph.D., FACSM
My last article focused on why glucose was the best short-term treatment for hypoglycemia, but this time I want to switch gears and talk about why treating lows is not as straight-forward as you would think. It mainly stems from the fact that sometimes hypoglycemia can be very difficult to treat effectively and even hard to prevent in many cases, particularly related to physical activity.

A study published in Diabetologia in October 2016 discussed whether exercise training is more important than other lifestyle changes in preventing type 2 diabetes (and possibly reversing prediabetes). Honestly, I was very heartened by its findings.

For those healthcare providers who treat diabetes with any kind of regularity, it has become increasingly obvious that several of our patients fall outside the current diabetes classification system. With individualization of patient care being the new focus, it can be challenging to accomplish this, when certain diabetic individuals don’t “conform” to the current definitions.

Why are people inactive, especially when they have diabetes and know how much physical activity could benefit them? If they’re older, overweight or obese, arthritic, or dealing with other physical or joint limitations, they may not feel capable of walking for exercise, and they may not have easy access to other types of activities. This may be particularly true of adults with nerve damage in their feet or arthritic knees for whom walking for exercise is just not feasible. Enter the Corratec Life Bike, particularly designed with adults with diabetes in mind.

Whenever someone gets diagnosed with type 1 diabetes (T1D) nowadays, the first thing that an educator or dietitian tries to teach them is how to count carbohydrates (carbs). Although I have been living with T1D now for almost half a century, I have to admit that I don’t count carbs. Not only that, but I personally don’t think carb counting works very well!

The topic of insulin action (resistance and sensitivity) has come up multiple times over the years in my articles, but it is admittedly much more complex than I often make it out to be. In a DIC article last summer, you can find a short list of all the factors that can potentially improve insulin action (basically insulin sensitivity). In reality, though, sometimes it is impossible to know exactly what is causing your reduced insulin action from day to day and how to easily and consistently manage it.