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Diabetes is a serious medical condition that can affect your everyday life. If you’ve been diagnosed with diabetes – or you’re at risk of it – there are certain exercises you should try to include in your workout routine, ITV This Morning’s resident doctor, Dr Sara Kayat, has revealed.
Diabetes is caused by blood sugar levels becoming too high, and about five million people in the UK have been diagnosed with the condition.
Around 90 percent of all diabetes cases are caused by type 2 diabetes; where the hormone insulin doesn’t work correctly, or the pancreas isn’t able to make enough of it.
Regular exercise could help to stabilise your blood sugar levels, however.
Keeping active is vital for diabetes patients, because it helps the body to use carbohydrates more efficiently.
If you have diabetes, you should aim to combine three different types of exercises, said Dr Sara.
Cardiovascular activities, strength training, and stretching exercises should all be part of your workout routine, she said.
Make sure to combine all three of them, as opposed to spending more time on just one.
Focussing on just strength training, for example, raises the risk of injuries, which will only hamper your exercise routine in the long term.
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“Exercise helps to stabilise your blood sugar levels,” Dr Sara told Express Health. “It helps to promote the way insulin works on your sugar levels, but it also works by utilising your stores of energy.
“I think it’s really important if you have diabetes type 2 to do an array of different types of exercises.
“It’s the same with anyone, really. You want to make sure you’re doing cardiovascular exercise, but you also want to make sure you’re strengthening your muscles, as well as doing stretching types of exercises; like yoga and pilates as well.
“It is important to make sure all of these work holistically, rather than just focussing on one, because you might end up with injuries if you are just focused on one area, and that will set you back in terms of your exercise anyway.”
Everyone should aim to do 150 minutes of exercise every week – but that doesn’t necessarily have to be solid jogging at the gym.
You could be including exercise into your daily lifestyle without even knowing it.
Anything that raises your heart rate and gets you moving could be counted towards your 150-minute target.
That could include fast-paced walking, heading to the gym, or simply doing the gardening.
A Fitbit could help empower patients to follow their weekly activity, she added.
“If you’ve got a little prompt that tells you, ‘you’ve only got to do x amount more steps to reach that goal’, you might put a little bit more pace on to try and achieve that goal,” Dr Sara explained.
“You can fit your exercises into everyday life, and I think that’s where these types of technology really helps that.”
Dr Sara and Fitbit are supporting charity Diabetes UK’s One Million Step Challenge this summer, which encourages people to take one million steps from July 1 to September 30 – the equivalent to about 10,000 steps a day.
The aim is to help the public get active, maintain a healthy weight, and help to raise money.
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