Diabetes and Exercise Columns and More

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Diabetes in Control.com
Read online articles about Diabetes, Exercise, and More by Sheri R. Colberg PhD

dLife--For Your Diabetes Life!
Read online articles about Diabetes, Health, Exercise and Lifestyle by Sheri R. Colberg PhD, FACSM

A research study in the July 2006 issue of Diabetes Care tested out the exact regimen that I always recommend, which involves increasing exercise intensity at least during part of your normal workouts. In that study, they took individuals with type 2 diabetes who were already walking over 10,000 steps a day (good for them!) and added a “Pick Up the Pace,” or PUP, program to their training that involved increased walking speeds. The participants wore pedometers and determined their usual walking pace as the number of steps they took during a 10-minute walk; then they established a training cadence that was 10% above their usual pace 30 minutes per day three days a week. For example, if someone’s usual pace was 90 steps per minute, he or she would increase his/her walking pace to about 100 steps per minute during that time. As a result, after 12 weeks of PUP training, participants increased their fitness beyond what they had already achieved walking 10,000 steps a day without walking any extra, but simply walking faster for 90 minutes a week.

The PUP study involved walking, an aerobic activity that, by definition, is one that uses your large muscles rhythmically and continuously for more than two minutes at a time. All of the more traditional exercises (i.e., walking, jogging, cycling, swimming, aerobic dance, and more) qualify as aerobic, but so do some of the newer ones, such as in-line skating, aquatic exercise classes, “hip hop dancing” classes, and some segments of Pilates workouts. The current recommendation for everyone is to engage in a minimum of three to five days per week of aerobic exercise done for 30 to 60 minutes—either continuously or cumulatively, as long as it occurs in bouts of 10 minutes or longer.

To get the most out of your aerobic exercise, keep the PUP study in mind. During any activity, you can simply increase the intensity of your exercise for short periods of time (so-called “interval training”) to gain more fitness and health benefits from it. To start with, if you are out walking, speed up slightly for a short distance (such as between two light poles or mailboxes) before slowing back down to your original pace. During the course of your walk, continue to include these short, faster intervals occasionally, and, as you are able to, lengthen these intervals so that they last two to five minutes at a time (or even up to 30 minutes, like was done in the PUP study). Not only will you become more fit and use up extra calories doing so, but you also will likely feel more tired when you finish your walk (which is actually a good thing). Over the course of several weeks, you may even find that your general walking speed has increased due to the extra conditioning from your interspersed bouts of faster walking.

Increasing exercise intensity even briefly works for everyone. For instance, unfit men and women in their 30s and 40s in another study trained just twice a week doing only three to four minutes of aerobic exercise at an intensity of 70-80% of their maximal heart rate (i.e., short, intense exercise), preceded and followed by three-minute warm-up and cool-down periods. By doing so, they increased their maximal aerobic capacity by over 13% in just 12 weeks, even though most people can’t increase their maximal capacity by more than 25% total, no matter how much or how long they train. Almost unbelievably, the participants in this study experienced major gains in their aerobic capacity by doing a total of 6-8 minutes of harder exercise a week.

Perhaps studies like these explain the sudden interest in the ROM Time Machine, an exercise machine available in specialized gyms that you work on for only four minutes at a time, but at a near-maximal pace. Workouts like those are definitely not going to get you as fit as longer sessions of aerobic exercise, and they certainly won’t prepare you to run a marathon, but short, intense work has its benefits. The same intensity principle applies to almost every kind of exercise you do, from walking to cycling to gardening. In fact, even competitive athletes generally plateau at a certain level unless they do some version of this heavier “interval” training from time to time.

Tips for Optimizing Your Endurance Training