Beat diabetes with your WORKOUT

There are many health benefits to regular exercise. They range from living longer, having more energy, boosting your mood as well as improving your sex life. So it should come as no surprise that exercise could help beat diabetes too. But don't just hop on a treadmill and call it a day. Read on to discover why he way you exercise is key to beating diabetes.

Getting regular exercise is just one of the important steps of dealing with diabetes. But are you doing it right?

Findings of a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association show that how you exercise is just as important as the exercise itself and the right combination of resistance training and aerobic workouts can unlock two key benefits: Lower blood sugar levels and fewer meds.

Revealed: The power of exercise in beating diabetes

In the study, researchers randomly assigned 221 previously sedentary volunteers to one of three workout programmes for 12 weeks:

• Resistance training for three days a week, consisting of two sets of abdominal crunches and back extensions, two sets of four upper-body exercises and three sets of three leg exercises with weight machines.
• Aerobic exercise consisting of 150 minutes a week of moderate walking on a treadmill.
• Two days of resistance exercises per week along with a little less of that moderate treadmill walking.
• Another 41 volunteers served as a control group and didn't exercise at all.

At the start of the programme, the patients had an average HbA1C (glycatedhaemoglobin) reading of 7.7%.

12 weeks later, “the combo group lowered those levels by 0.34% compared to the control group, the only change in the study considered to be statistically significant,” writes Jenny Thompson in Health Sciences Institute. The aerobics group saw a dip of 0.24% and the resistance trainers dropped by 0.16% when compared to the control group.

The ones who participated in the combination workouts were also the only ones to lose weight.

But they also lost something else: Reliance of Diabetes meds

Those who did both forms of exercise needed less of their drugs to control the disease. Proof of just how effective exercise is.

But while exercise is an important first step, it won’t beat diabetes on its own.

The real answer starts with what you eat.

So focus on the low-carb foods that can keep your blood-sugar levels down, along with a few key supplements and make sure you get the right combination of exercise. It could help you reduce your need for meds, if not eliminate it completely.

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