Exercise is incredibly helpful for almost any kind of disease. It can be particularly beneficial for people who suffer from diabetes, as it can help them to get some measure of control over their varied symptoms. Let’s look at some of the advantages of regular exercise for people who are suffering from type 1 diabetes.
General Exercise Advantages
There are a few things that exercise can help you with, many of which are related to diabetes and its different symptoms. Exercise helps to get your blood pressure under control, reducing stress and anxiety. It also reduces your LDL cholesterol, which is an unhealthy cholesterol, bringing down your triglycerides too. At the same time, exercise can increase healthy cholesterol, known by the name HDL cholesterol.
Regular exercise improves the strength of your bones and your muscles, it gives you a sense of wellbeing, and it does this by oxygenating your blood, improving respiration and blood flow, which in turn provides you with an overall sense of wellness.
By exercising regularly, you will be able to get your weight under control as well. This is a major issue for people who have type one diabetes. Becoming overweight doesn’t cause type one diabetes, but it can be tougher to control some of the symptoms of diabetes if your weight is out of control, or if you are overweight.
Blood Sugar and Insulin Benefits
One of the most notable benefits of exercise for people with type one diabetes is how it relates to their insulin resistance. Exercising can help decrease your blood glucose levels, or blood sugar levels. That will help to increase how sensitive your body is to insulin. This fights back against the insulin resistance created by type 1 diabetes.
What that means is that if you can get your weight under control and keep it under control through regular exercise, you may not need insulin injections as often. Your body may be able to produce its own insulin rather than rely on treatments that provide you with an outside source of insulin. That is incredibly important for people who are living with type one diabetes. This means their symptoms can start to get under control and they will be less likely to need as much treatment.
Reduces Heart Disease Risk
Moderate exercise can have a big impact on diabetes morbidity rates. For instance, women who spend four hours or more every week doing exercise and who have diabetes have a much lower risk of suffering from a heart attack or experiencing some kind of heart disease. This is compared to women who don’t exercise. Their heart disease risk is incredibly lower, at 40% compared to women who don’t exercise.
What’s amazing is that this decreased risk is still there even if there are other factors that could confound the results, like an unhealthy BMI, a smoking habit, and various other factors that contribute to heart disease risk.
All Exercise Helps
There is a link between type one diabetes and exercise that indicates that no matter what kind of exercise you’re doing, it’s going to benefit your diabetic condition. It will help with symptoms, reduce the need for treatment, and help those with diabetes to live longer, healthier, and fuller lives.
Whether you’re doing resistance exercise, aerobic exercise, or a combination of the two (that is known as combined training), your benefits will be evident. The HbA1c values will decrease as you do regular exercise, improving your overall health and the severity of the diabetic condition.
The HbA1c is a type of hemoglobin that shares a link with sugar. As that level increases, and the HbA1c value goes up, blood sugar levels and insulin resistance increases. As that level lowers, those stats look better and healthier. Getting that hemoglobin under control is really vital to living a healthy and full life as a diabetic.
Touching back on the topic of different kinds of exercises, if you are doing both resistance and aerobic exercise, the benefits to your diabetes and your overall healthiness increase. If possible, it would be good to do a combination of aerobic and resistance exercises, to help treat your condition more effectively.