I have increased my walking in the last couple of weeks from 1.5 miles to around 3.5 miles almost every day. I have also been slowly adding back in squats with two 20 lb dumb bells followed up by pumping them together overhead. I have to make sure I do double sets of yoga type back bends (my chiropractor calls them McKenzie movements or push backs) for the lower back. This is because of the L4, L5, S1 problem I had 3 years ago and I do not want it back. For some reason the squats with the weights seem to have a fairly dramatic effect on BG levels.
What about the fast paced "interval walking" sessions?
I am going to post a LINK at the end of this post on guidelines for those beginning a walking program to help combat Type 2 diabetes and just because if is good for your overall health and well being. The article is based on a study outlined in Diabetes Care magazine and is quite informative.
The study indicated significant health gains from an increase in exercise as follows:
EXCERPT:
The authors found significant health benefits with increases in physical activity of >10 MET h/week, and they suggest that this is the minimum increase in physical activity required to achieve health and financial benefits in sedentary patients with type 2 diabetes. Further, they found that the health benefits of physical activity continued to increase as physical activity increased up to a maximum of 21–30 MET h/week. Thus, they recommend 27 MET h/week as a good target for sedentary patients with type 2 diabetes.
So what is a 10MET h/week? Good question.
The article is geared towards INCREASING your present level of activity by at least 1.2 miles a day. In other words if you are already walking 1.2 miles, you are encouraged to double that to 2.4 miles a day. I would encourage you to also try the interval walking where once each time around your high school or college track you walk half of it at a very FAST pace or walk one time around at your normal brisk pace and the next one as FAST as you can possibly walk it. This will increase your metabolism and for the guys BOOST your testosterone production.
EXCERPT:
A good starting target for your patients is to increase walking by at least 1.2 miles/day or 30 min or 2,400 steps/day. Keep in mind that these recommendations are increases over the present level of walking and are a very achievable increase for most people. Greater health benefits will accrue with more physical activity, and ideally you can help your patients continue to increase toward a more optimal goal of 3.2 miles or 77 min or 6,400 steps or even more. It makes sense to start with small changes. It might be hard to get an initial increase of 3.2 miles/day in many of your patients, but most could add an extra 1.2 miles, especially considering they do not have to do it all at once and can accumulate this over the day.
If you don't like charts and all of that, increasing your number of steps by 2000 a day is a great place to start. Remember MOST of the population whether diabetic or not do not get anywhere close to the amount of aerobic exercise they need to stay healthy.
Here is the LINK:
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/28/6/1524.full
Dan
Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness. ~Edward Stanley
No comments:
Post a Comment