Without Delay: Why You Should Start an Exercise Regimen Now If You Are Diabetic

It is common knowledge that exercise actually helps to prevent and manage diabetes. This article takes a deeper look into how it does this.

There are two types of exercise that you can do if you are diabetic; aerobic and resistance training. Both have positive effects on diabetes. Aerobic exercise is physical activity that uses large muscles or more than one muscle groups, makes you breathe faster and your heart beat faster. 

It is recommended that you do 30 to 60 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous aerobic exercise to gain the full benefits of this. And the good thing about it is that it doesn't have to be at a stretch. The same health benefits is gotten if you break these minutes into several parts stretched throughout the day. For aerobic exercise, you should learn how to warm up first and also how to cool down at the end of the exercise period. This can be for 5-10 minutes each way.

Warming up and warming down is important to enable the body slowly adjust itself to the new activity status- exertion and back to relaxation. This would guide against straining of muscles including possibly, heart muscle; and when winding down, allow the body processes slowly come back to a state of equilibrium. Aerobic exercise that you can try include jogging, climbing stairs, walking briskly, riding a bicycle whether indoors (a stationary exercise bike) or outdoors, hiking, playing soccer, basketball or other sports, dancing and a myriad of others.

The other type of exercise that can be done is strength or resistance training. What is that? Resistance training is basically light to moderate physical activity that builds muscles and keeps your bones healthy. Having more muscles and less fat means that you burn more calories. This being because muscles burn more calories than fat, doing so even during the intervals between your next exercise session.

Now since burning more calories actually contributes to you losing or keeping weight off, if you are Type 2 diabetic or at risk of it, that automatically means you have lessened your risk factor or improved its management. One reason why this is so is that nominally in a Type 2 diabetic, fat cells may inhibit the beta cells of the pancreas from functioning properly and creating insulin whilst on the other hand fat deposits around the liver prevent liver cells from properly responding to the insulin. Therefore a decrease in fat, will tend to improve function in these two organs leading to a corollary improvement in insulin secretion and receptivity.

Strength training can be done with dumb bells, weight machines, elastic bands etc. or you can use your own body weight through exercises like press ups, pull ups, squats and the like. Do this for at least two to three times a week for maximum benefit. It is always best to start particularly if you have not previously been exercising, with light weights and then gradually increase the size of your weights with time.

Stretching exercises can also be beneficial. Stretching exercises are those types of exercise which improves the flexibility of your limbs and muscles, the maneuverability of your joints and reduces risk of injury. The results of a study carried out on flexibility exercises ability to reduce exercise induced injury however seems to negate this assertion. Nevertheless, it was found that flexibility exercise when done in tandem with resistance training can increase range of Motion (ROM) in Type 2 diabetics. An example of flexibility exercise is yoga. Another is the type of stretching exercises you may come across in an aerobic fitness class. For example "touch your toes", the knee to chest and the ham string stretch.

With these exercises, particularly aerobics, as earlier stated, it is not compulsory that one spends the scheduled work minutes/hours at once. In view of that physical activity within the house or environment depending on what it is, can actually count towards your daily exercise target. So for instance; doing chores like cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, working in the garden or walking your dog or taking a walk through your neighborhood, climbing the stairs instead of taking the elevator, walking to the local grocers instead of taking the car etc. can all count towards making this up.

Although in fairness, it may be better to fulfill at least 90 percent of your standard exercise regimen before regarding your extra physical activity as a make up for the remaining ten. This is because such activities usually have no set time or are prone to be forgotten or postponed. You may also not take them as seriously as your regular set exercise, thus leading you to miss your daily exercise goals.