Lifting Could Help Diabetics

Lifting weights may help to control the most common form of diabetes.

Two studies indicate weight training aids the body in making more efficient use of the insulin it produces, which could fight development or worsening of non-insulin-dependent diabetes. This condition is estimated to account for 90 percent of diabetes.

In non-insulin-dependent diabetes, the pancreas’ insulin-producing cells do not work well enough to produce the hormone in amounts needed, and the body isn’t able to break down enough glucose, a sugar cells need for fuel.

Especially in its early stages, this form of diabetes usually can be controlled by diet and exercise under a doctor’s supervision.

Aerobic exercise burns glycogen, a form of glucose stored in muscles. This is the type of exercise typically recommended. However, reports in the American Physiological Society’s Journal of Applied Physiology add to evidence that weight training works as well.

“It’s probably an effect on muscle,” said researcher Matthew S. Hickey of East Carolina University of Greenville, N.C. “Insulin will bind to muscle and tell it to take up the glucose from the blood.”

While at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., Hickey worked on one of the journal studies. In this project, researchers looked at 17 people, of which seven were diabetes patients. The diabetes patients averaged 53 years of age - not unusual in a disease that typically does not manifest itself until after 30. Of the healthy subjects, seven were around 27 and the rest were around 51.

The men and women were trained in how to use Nautilus exercise machines. They then were tested to see the maximum amount of weight they could lift at one try, and were later given a workout, based on their maximums, that would be strenuous enough to leave them tired. Before the one-time maximal lifts and the workout, the subjects drank 75 grams of glucose, a standard amount used to test for diabetes.

Eighteen hours after the workout, diabetic and non-diabetic patients both showed a decrease in total insulin response with no change in the amount of glucose in the blood, the report said. This indicates the body was able to use insulin more efficiently after exercise in holding the glucose level steady.

The reductions in insulin were 18 percent for the younger non-diabetics and 14 percent for the older ones, but 21 percent for the diabetics.

Using exercise to make the body more insulin-efficient could help to counter the progression of diabetes, Hickey said. In the condition’s early stages, the body typically responds to an oversupply of glucose by stimulating overproduction of insulin, which burns out the pancreatic cells that make the hormone. This creates an insulin shortage later.

The changes are about what would be expected for a single session of aerobic exercise, Hickey said. But this is the first study to see such changes for a single session of weight training, the study reported.

In a separate report, researchers at the University of Maryland and the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center found that strength training increased insulin action and lowered insulin levels in the blood of healthy men ages 50 to 65.