Harder or softer?

Shaun, who posts to Diabetes Daily as Stump86, got me thinking with this excellent post, about hard vs. soft workouts and their more immediate effect on my Blood Glucose level.

My thinking was that, for the most part at least, using up the free glucose that is already floating around in my veins, through exercise, would lower my BG level. So I made sure I was aware of the symptoms of hypoglycemia (too low) and cranked up my longstanding (about five years) workout a bit. But it turns out to be more complicated than that.

Yes, the muscles want to soak up that sugar floating around in my blood. They are sending out their cries of pain telling my body, more please, more. The problem is that to use that glucose, my muscles need insulin, and if I’m not making enough insulin to keep up, then those cries are going to be unanswered. The result will be my liver dumping more and more glucose into my blood steam in a futile attempt to feed muscles that can’t use the high level of blood sugar already present due to a lack of insulin.

Therefore it is possible for my blood glucose reading to go up as I exercise.

The reason this is so important to me at the moment is that I’m trying to change my body composition for the first time in my life, rather than just increase endurance for a particular (automobile racing) activity. If I am insulin resistant, then it is important for me to lose what fat I have, especially the hard-to-lose-most-insulin-resistant belly fat, but since I don’t have that much to lose, I need to work on the other side of the ratio more than many other diabetics by trying to gain more muscle mass. The ratio of lean muscle to fat can heavily influence how effective my insulin is, and the more effective the more control I’ll have over my blood glucose level.

The problem is these two goals require two different types of exercise (aerobic vs. anaerobic) and have, as Stump86 points out, two different potential immediate effects on BG level and possibly two different intermediate effects on my pre-meal baseline as well. And just to make it even more complex, interval training, which is often built into Jessica’s beach workout, is a combination of the two types anyway.

Corona Del Mar, Site of Jessica's beach workout
For now then, my rules are that I shouldn’t do two anaerobic (muscle building) days in a row, while keeping Jessica’s beach work-out, three days a week.

So it’s Corona Del Mar on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The Y for a mixed (40 minute aerobic, twenty minute weight training) on Wednesdays, and one full hour a week of weight training on Saturdays.

Ouch.