Why You Should Be Lifting Weights if You Have Type 2 Diabetes

How Lifting Weights May Make Managing Type 2 Diabetes Easier

Diabetes is marked by the body’s inability to process glucose and use insulin efficiently, but strength training can help with these issues in various ways.

Burns Up Blood Sugar

Strength training relies primarily on the body’s glycolytic, or glucose-using, metabolic system for energy. “As we go through a strength training workout, we use stored muscle glycogen for fuel,” says Nick Occhipinti, CSCS, an exercise physiologist based in Red Bank, New Jersey. “Once this stored muscle glycogen runs out, we start to mobilize extra glycogen from the liver and from the blood. This [process] helps directly decrease blood glucose as well as deplete stored muscle and liver glycogen stores, giving blood glucose a place to go next time you eat.”

Improves Glucose Storage

Your muscles serve as storage facilities for consumed sugar and carbohydrates. “Trained muscle has a higher capacity to store blood glucose in the form of glycogen, aiding in lowering blood glucose,” says Occhipinti. The result: Lowered blood sugar levels and easier glucose management.

Spurs Weight Loss

Apart from burning calories during your workouts, strength training promotes fat loss by increasing levels of lean muscle mass. “Muscle is one of the few metabolically active tissues in the body at total rest,” says Occhipinti. “This means that even as we sit around and watch football or sit at a desk and work, the muscle we have on our body is serving to burn calories.”

Targets Harmful Belly Fat

6 Tips for Strength Training With Diabetes

1. Talk to Your Healthcare Team

As with any exercise program, check with your healthcare team before starting a weight training regimen, making a point to discuss your blood sugar management specifically.

“People don’t typically associate strength training with low blood sugar, but some patients will have significant impacts on blood sugar with strength training,” says Wilson. Your doctor may recommend testing your blood sugar level before, during, and after exercise, as well as eating carbohydrates around workout time to prevent or address hypoglycemia, she adds.

2. Ask for Help

“To gain more health benefits from physical activity programs, participation in supervised training is recommended over non-supervised programs,” says Wilson. For guidance, consider working out with a certified trainer or joining a weight training class, both of which are available in person and virtually.

3. Focus on the Body’s Largest Muscle Groups

Occhipinti recommends working on your gluteal muscles, hamstrings, quadriceps, latissimus dorsi, trapezius, and chest muscles. Some of the best strength exercises that target these muscle groups are compound, multijoint movements such as squats, lunges, deadlifts, hamstring curls, rows, lat pull-downs, chest presses, and push-ups, he says.

4. Follow a Plan

Mapping out what you want your workouts to look like can help you make and keep a routine, says Audra Wilson, RD, CSCS, a bariatric dietitian and strength and conditioning specialist at the Northwestern Medicine Metabolic Health and Surgical Weight Loss Center at Delnor Hospital in Geneva, Illinois.

If you plan to strength train two or three times per week, she says you’re better off making all of your workouts total body workouts. However, if your strength training is going to be more frequent, such as four or five days per week, alternating between upper body and lower body workouts, or push and pull workouts, can help ensure that each muscle group still gets the recovery time it needs.

Wilson recommends trying new variations of your favorite exercise or altering your number of sets or reps every 8–12 weeks to keep your workouts — and results — progressing.

5. Prioritize Recovery

Giving yourself one (if not two) days in between working a particular muscle group can allow it time to repair while still training it with sufficient frequency to adapt and grow, says Wilson. Great recovery day options include foam rolling, stretching, and low-intensity cardio like walking or cycling.

6. Consider Multiple Tools

Barbells, dumbbells, and weight machines can be useful strength training tools, but they aren’t mandatory, says Occhipinti. Resistance bands, filled duffle bags, and other household items are also effective in loading the muscles and are particularly great for helping you log more at-home workouts.

How Strength Training Helps Protect Against Diabetes Complications

By improving insulin health and lowering high blood sugar levels, strength training helps guard against some of the complications of type 2 diabetes. But it takes on diabetes complications in other ways, too.

Improves Heart Health

Boosts Bone Density

Prevents Age-Related Muscle Loss

Reduces the Risk of Peripheral Neuropathy and Vision Loss

“When you have chronically high blood sugar, glucose molecules start attaching themselves to everything, including your red blood cells, preventing healthy blood flow in many places in the body where you have very small blood vessels,” says Occhipinti.

It just so happens that the eyes and nerves of the hands and feet have these small vessels. When these areas don’t get the blood flow they need, peripheral neuropathy and diabetic retinopathy can occur. Strength training improves blood flow to reduce the risk of these complications, says Occhipinti.

You can join the conversation in the forums on Everyday Health’s network site Diabetes Daily.