Strength Training and interval cardio slash diabetes and heart risks....

Today's Post: Friday, 7-29-2011

This is true for many reasons!

a) One of them is that having more muscle mass means that even when you are NOT exercising you burn more glucose and that alone helps lower your blood sugar, lower your insulin level, and prevents or turns down insulin resistance.

More on this point later in this post. This was just tested to work at UCLA!

b) The other is that the effort you make to do your last repetition in a strength training exercise or when you speed up to do as many pushups as you can do before fatigue sets in or you alternate between moderate walking and almost as fast as you can go in your walks or you run five fast 100 yard runs or do five very fast but short sets of jump rope and rest in between—

Every single one of those will cause your body to build more muscle as it recovers. But each of these also burns glucose like having 12 strong men toss it into a roaring furnace!

That’s also well established.

One study found that even two sets of really fast cardio for a minute, a short rest to catch their breath, and a second one and doing that just a few times a week for less than 10 minute time a week, lowered blood sugar for weeks afterwards. That’s because the test showed that the HBA1C reading that is the average of your blood sugar the last 60 to 90 days went down significantly in the people who did this!

c) Not only that, but this kind of exercise a few times a week regularly has been shown to sharply lower the small particle LDL that causes much to most of the blood vessel plaque that causes heart disease.

Your protective HDL goes up and your damaging levels of triglycerides go down. Research shows that directly reflects that your small particle LDL has gone down.

And, there’s more! The more years in a row you keep doing this, the more effective it gets. Recent research each year on a group of people who did this kind of exercise every week found this is true.

d) Unbelievably that’s not all either!

Lowering your blood sugar levels, recent research found, prevents excess sugar from sticking to your normally safe larger LDL particles and turning them into nasty bits of superglue that cause damage to the inside of your blood vessels and destroys your capillaries.

e) One way to see if you have been getting this kind of exercise is to check for how much muscle mass you have. That’s because the more of strength training and interval cardio you do well, the more muscle mass you have.

You don’t have to look muscular, particularly if you are female or a bit too fat. You don’t even have to weigh less. Though in that case, if you add muscle, you will also lose that much fat. Your size may go down from that even if your scale reads the same.

Here’s the report of the recent research at UCLA:

“Beef up your muscles, reduce your diabetes risk By Enrique Rivero
July 28, 2011 UCLA Newsroom

More muscle mass -- and not just less body fat -- is critical to lowering your risk for type 2 diabetes, a new UCLA study suggests.

Reporting in the September issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, researchers from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA suggest there is a correlation between greater muscle mass, relative to body size, and a substantially decreased risk of developing the metabolic changes that lead to diabetes.

"Our findings suggest that beyond focusing on losing weight to improve metabolic health, there may be a role for maintaining fitness and building muscle mass," said Dr. Preethi Srikanthan, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of endocrinology at UCLA. "This is a welcome message for many overweight patients who experience difficulty in achieving weight loss, as any effort to get moving and keep fit should be seen as laudable and contributing to metabolic change."

In 2009, the UCLA researchers published a study suggesting that the ratio of waist size to hip size — an indirect measure of abdominal fat, relative to gluteal musculature — is a better predictor of premature death in older adults than either body mass index (BMI) or waist circumference. They then examined a condition called sarcopenic obesity, in which there is a low level of total body muscle mass (sarcopenia) combined with a high BMI (obesity), theorizing that the presence of this condition would correlate with higher insulin resistance and diabetes risk.

The following year, they tested this hypothesis by examining data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III (NHANES III); the data were culled from health information collected between 1988 and 1994 on 17,000 people aged 20 and older — a large number of people of various ages. They found that sarcopenia was associated with increased insulin resistance in both non-obese and obese individuals, and also with higher levels of blood glucose in obese individuals.

For the current study, they again used NHAHES III data, this time on 13,644 adults who were not pregnant and had a BMI of at least 16.5, to see how this correlation applied to individuals representing the entire spectrum of muscle mass levels, rather than only those with sarcopenia. Specifically, they wanted to determine if there was a correlation between higher levels of muscle mass and lower levels of insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes.

After controlling for age, race and ethnicity, gender, generalized obesity (high BMI), and central obesity (large waist), they found that for each 10 percent increase in the skeletal muscle index (SMI) — the ratio of muscle mass to total body weight — there was a corresponding 11 percent reduction in insulin resistance and a 12 percent reduction in pre–diabetes, a condition characterized by higher-than-normal levels of glucose in the blood.

"While we knew there was a relationship between metabolic disorders and very low muscle mass, we were surprised to find that this relationship was preserved across the range of muscle mass," Srikanthan said.”

My comment: That’s useful to know. For example, doing strength training a few times a week besides doing cardio a few times a week, builds more muscle mass than just doing interval cardio. That specifically means strength training is important to include to get this effect!

“Dr. Arun Karlamangla, a UCLA associate professor of medicine in the division of geriatrics, co-authored this study. The National Institutes of Health funded this research.”

Are you doing strength training and interval cardio yet?

If not, you can do both at home.

Pushups work for strength training. You can do each exercise with one dumbbell -- and doing a set with your left hand and immediately doing one with your right hand. This not only costs less, but you just keep exercising since every time you do a set with one hand your other hand and side are resting! That makes it possible to do several exercises in less than 10 minutes.

And, even 8 to 10 minutes, and at first as you get into it even less, of interval cardio a session for at least 3 days not in a row can enable you to be quite fit.

The Nordic Track I work out on every Saturday morning for 10 intense minute with regular bursts of faster work and easier and slower work in between did cost $150 used. And, I did have to go pick it up which took a few hours.

But I pay ZERO dollars a month for it now!

I plan to get a few heavier dumbbells now that I’m stronger and know I can buy single dumbbells at two different sporting goods chains.

But the 15, 20, & 25 pound dumbells I use now, cost less than $40 total. I started with just the 15 pound one which cost something like $5 at a yard sale and $5 for the 20 pound one at a garage sale. And the 25 pound one was about $30.

Again, I pay ZERO dollars a month for them now!

On Monday evening and Wednesday evening I do 5 short but fast sets of jump rope. The jump rope cost me less than $20 at the sporting good store.

No monthly payments needed for that one either.

And, this can take very, very little time.

Secondly, even though I do more since I have the time. I can do the first part of my strength training with my 25 pound dumbbell in about 9 minutes. At three mornings a week, I could do as little as 27 minutes of exercise each week total.

My jump rope sessions only take about 15 minutes each time. (The jumping session only takes about 7 minutes. But I do a bit of very light and brief leg exercise first to warm up and it takes a few minutes to change into dry clothes after sweating into my work out ones,) Three of those would total as little as 45 minutes a week.

Doing both would take 72 minutes each week total. That’s just a bit over 10 minutes a day average.

And if I did the jump rope sessions in the morning so I took my regular shower right after, the total would be about 54 minutes a week. That averages about 8 minutes a day.

Lastly, when you first start take it very east and build up slowly. And, when you do the interval cardio stop before you completely run out of breath and rest in between the intervals.

For example, I now do five sets of 42 to 77 jumps with my jump rope and mostly do each set without missing once. And, I really race through each set.

But I started with two sets of 14 and I had to do each set in sections because I kept messing up. I’d do a couple of jumps, miss, do a few more etc on each set!

So it’s OK to start slow and be a klutz. The secret is to keep doing the exercises and making small improvements and progress each week.

One of my favorite self-help writers puts it this way: “Inch by inch anything’s a cinch.”