Why Weight Training Will Lower Your Chance of Diabetes by 59%

The diabetic epidemic is only growing, but there’s something that could lower your chances of becoming a part of it: scientists reveal that weight training may lower the risk of adult-type diabetes by 34%, and combining aerobic exercise with weight training may lower the risk by 59%.

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TrimDownClub, Dec 16, 2012
Research conducted over 18 years revealed that certain types of physical activity may decrease the risk of type 2 diabetes in men. The research was published in the August 2012 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

What will lower your chance of having diabetes by 59%?

For many years now, it’s been known that physical exercise can prevent diabetes in adults, but it wasn’t clear whether the positive effect was contributed only by aerobic exercise, or also by anaerobic exercise.

Researchers at the public health schools of Harvard University and the University of Southern Denmark examined over 32,000 men, of whom nearly 2300 had type 2 diabetes during the years of research. The researchers found that anaerobic weight-lifting 30 minutes per day, 5 times a week, lowered the chance of having diabetes by 34%. It was found that lifting weights even on a less frequent basis (one to two-and-a-half hours a week) could lower the risk by 12-25%. While aerobic activity such as brisk walking was found to be more effective, the combination of the two – aerobics and weight-lifting for 150 minutes each per week – decreased the risk by a total of 59%.

According to researchers, it is unclear whether the same results can be expected in women.

According to the authors, the findings also suggest that weight training provides an alternative option for type 2 diabetes prevention for people who “have difficulty engaging in or adhering to aerobic exercise,” and “…weight training can be incorporated with aerobic exercise to get the best results.”

2 Types of Diabetes

Diabetes is divided into 2 types: type 1 diabetes, also called juvenile or insulin-dependent diabetes, and type 2 diabetes also called adult or adult-onset diabetes, which can also affect children and become insulin-dependent at later stages. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks the pancreas cells that are responsible for producing the insulin hormone. Insulin is responsible for introduction of sugar from the blood into the cells in order to create energy. About 10% of all diabetics have type 1 diabetes, and the rest have type 2 diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes usually appears after the age of 40, but cases in youth are becoming more common as the degree of obesity increases globally. This type of diabetes it due to a reduction in the body’s sensitivity to insulin, frequently brought on in great part by excess body fat, and results in accumulation of sugar in the blood. In this disorder, the pancreas secretes increasing amounts of insulin to cope, until depletion of its capacity. Many of these patients also become dependent on daily injections of insulin.

Improve your health and reduce your risk–the Trim Down Club can help.