People with type 2 diabetes can significantly lower their blood sugar -- and lose a few pounds, too -- if they begin an exercise program that combines aerobics and weight lifting, new research suggests.
Fitness experts have long recommended combining both kinds of activity for effective weight loss. But this study offers some of the best evidence yet that the combination helps diabetics manage their blood sugar better than each alone -- even if they don't increase their total exercise time.
It's thought that the combination works because weight lifting builds more muscle, while aerobic activity helps those muscles use up blood sugar.
For the study, Dr. Timothy Church, director of preventive medicine research at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University, led a team who followed 262 inactive, racially diverse Type 2 diabetics, whose average age 56. The patients were divided into four groups:
- • resistance training with weight machines
- • aerobic hill walking on a treadmill
- • a combination of both exercises
- • no exercise as all
Each group exercised for about 45 minutes three days a week under the supervision of fitness experts.
After nine months, all the exercise groups had reduced their waist sizes compared with the non-exercise group. But only the group that combined aerobics and weights lowered both their blood sugar and lost weight.
The participants who did the combination training lowered their blood level of a glucose marker called ‘HbA1c" to 7.3 per cent from 7.7 per cent. While the number might sound small, that's a drop that corresponds to a significantly reduced risk of heart disease.
(The HbA1C test looks at long-term (i.e. two to three months) blood sugar concentration, unlike a fasting blood glucose test, which only measures blood glucose that day.).
Meanwhile, the blood sugar changes in the other exercise groups were not more significant compared with those in the non-exercise group.
Fewer patients in the combination group started taking new diabetes drugs than in the other groups.
Forty-one per cent of the patients in the combo group either decreased their diabetes medications or lowered their average blood sugar, compared to 26 per cent for weights only, 29 per cent for aerobics only and 22 per cent in the non-exercise group.
"It also is important to appreciate that the follow-up difference in HbA1c between the combination training group and the control group occurred even though the control group had increased its use of diabetes medications while the combination training group decreased its diabetes medication uses," the authors note.
