subject: What Is Insulin Resistance [print this page] What is insulin resistance? Well, its basically what diabetics have, specifically type II diabetics. Insulin is a very important hormone in the body and is secreted by the pancreas. It helps to shuttle nutrients to their proper destinations throughout your body. And the main role that it plays is shuttling glucose to its main destination throughout your body. But when you are insulin resistant, this process is tough to make happen and thats why people who are diabetic or insulin resistant have high circulating blood glucose numbers.
It sort of goes like this
Make believe you have a cell with a door on it. Insulin comes knocking on the cells door and says hey open up, I have a present for you (which is glucose to be used for energy). However the cell never opens its doors because he doesnt like insulin anymore. He has heard his bag of tricks before and just wont open his door. So insulin has knock harder and harder (your body pumping out more insulin) until the cell finally opens its doors.
But sometimes this doesnt even happen. The person is so insulin resistant that the cell never opens its doors, the body stops producing insulin because and therefore the person is now a Type II diabetic. And with diabetes comes a host of health problems such as possible blindness, coma, amputations, and the list just goes on and on. Thats how poisonous high levels of circulating blood glucose are for your body.
Now a diabetic who is type 1 just does not produce insulin. Their body lacks the specific cells to do so therefore they have to always check their glucose levels and use insulin throughout the day.
But the great news regarding type II diabetes is that it can be reversible if extreme measures are taken. Sadly most people never take these measures. For example, exercise is a wonderful way to combat the effects of insulin resistance and actually increase a persons insulin sensitivity. The more insulin sensitive you are, the better off you will be, the leaner you will be, and the more you can actually eat and burn up. Very little insulin is needed by the body to produce and pump out to get a great effect.
So definitely I would say exercise can play a key role in helping someone manage their insulin resistance and possible reverse it. The perfect type of exercise will really be anything. Interval training would be great since this form of exercise mainly uses carbohydrates for fuel. Regular steady state cardio can get the job done as glucose will be burnt up for energy and insulin sensitivity will be increased but my personal opinion would be to stick with some form of interval training workouts.
You could also do any form of weight training in a circuit fashion to really get the heart rate up and burn a ton of carbohydrates. Weight training in some studies has a better effect on blood glucose uptake levels because the type of fuel mostly used is either glucose or muscular glycogen which is just carbohydrates that are stored in your muscle cells to be later used for fuel in activities such as resistance training.
A perfect routine would be a total body workout utilizing the big multi joint compound movements such as squats, dead lifts, pull-ups, rows, bench presses and overhead presses. Here is a sample routine that you could follow underneath.
Monday 3 sets of 5 for each exercise:
Front Squats
RDLs
Bench Presses
Pull ups
Barbell Curls
Dips
Wednesday 3 sets of 10 for each exercise:
Leg Press
Back Extensions
Incline Dumbbell Press
Dumbbell Rows
Supinated Pull Downs
Tricep Extensions
Friday 3 sets of 15 for each exercise:
In between these workouts on your off days feel free to add in some form of cardiovascular work. I would say start off with 20 minutes of sprint intervals on the treadmill and work up from there. If that is too hard for you then do 10 minutes of regular slow cardio and 10 minutes of interval training and try to switch that percentage up over time as you get more in shape. You can also throw in 1-2 interval training workouts and 1-2 regular steady state cardio workouts. Whatever really just suits you the best and your goals and current condition.
All in all I hope see the importance what is insulin resistance and how you should try and avoid it at all costs. Its a problem that can creep up on you and cause you to gain weight and develop diabetes. Do yourself a favor and start exercising to help prevent this from happening.
