You’ve likely been told that moving your body is “good for you” and that moving your body daily will lead to better overall health, as in better blood glucose values, better sleep, improved mood, reduced depression, higher bone density, weight loss, and improved quality of life.  And yet many people—regardless of whether they’re living with type 2 diabetes—still don’t take the necessary steps to incorporate movement into their lives.

What we’ve found is that understanding WHY exercise positively impacts blood glucose control makes a BIG difference in the likelihood that you will adopt an exercise regimen...and stick to it.

Your muscle plays a crucial role in controlling your blood glucose, in that it is one of the hungriest tissues for glucose in your body, both during exercise AND at rest. Muscle is also the most abundant tissue in the body and the most metabolically active.For this reason, the more muscle you have, the more glucose you can metabolize at any given time. In contrast to your liver and brain (which also use large amounts of glucose), your muscle tissue is also the easiest tissue to manipulate to your advantage by forcing it to contract and elongate frequently.

Research shows that low muscle strength and tone are both associated with a higher incidence of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. For this reason, it is IMPERATIVE to perform activities that stimulate your muscle fibers to contract and avoid sedentary behavior because it reduces your muscle tone.

Now, muscle fibers are recruited and activated on an as-needed basis. The more muscles you work at once, the more fibers you recruit. The harder you train, the more muscle fibers you activate. For this reason, you’ll see that we do our best to incorporate movements that involve multiple muscle groups. These are called “compound movements” and they are extremely effective at maximizing the number of muscle fibers you use at any given time.  

Exercise improves your blood glucose clearance by stimulating GLUT-4 transporters – which act as mini vesicles to suck glucose out of your blood and into muscle cells. What this means is that when you add resistance exercise to your regimen, your turn your muscle into a “glucose sponge” that does an excellent job of VACUUMING glucose out of your blood 24 hours a day.

Now that you know the reasons why exercise is important when living with type 2 diabetes, it will become much easier to motivate yourself to workout. Knowing WHY you are doing WHAT you are doing will help you stay on track with your health goals and stick to a workout routine.