A review of the world’s literature shows that high-intensity exercise, particularly interval training, causes greater reduction in HbA1c in diabetics than less intense exercise. HbA1c measures cell damage from high blood sugar levels. Many studies show that increasing exercise intensity controls blood sugar in diabetics more effectively than just increasing the duration of exercise.
How Does Exercise Lower Blood Sugar?
Exercise helps to treat the cause of most cases of diabetes -- failure of the cells to respond to insulin -- and it lowers blood sugar, insulin levels and body fat. Everybody’s blood sugar rises after eating. When blood sugar levels rise too high, sugar can stick to the outer membranes of cells and destroy them, which leads to all of the consequences of diabetes: blindness, deafness, impotence, loss of feeling, nerve pain, heart attacks, strokes, cancers, dementia and so forth.
Muscles use fat, sugar and, to a lesser degree protein, for energy. At rest, muscles get almost all of their energy from fat, so resting muscles draw almost no sugar from the bloodstream and need insulin to draw the meager amount they do use. On the other hand, contracting muscles draw large amounts of sugar from the bloodstream and don’t even need insulin to do so. Just starting an exercise program at lunch time significantly lowered blood sugar in diabetics.
