Yahoo Lifestyle This Simple Fitness Advice Can Help You Reduce Your Diabetes Risk
If you are a woman born in America in 2000, research suggests you have a 39 percent risk of develop type 2 diabetes in your lifetime. And while its hard to pinpoint risk numbers for the entire population, you can assume it's pretty high since one in ten Americans have diabetes, and about 90 to 95 percent of those are type 2 diabetes.
So, it makes sense that you might want to do everything you can to lower your personal risk of developing the disease. Major medical organizations suggest lifestyle changes like eating a healthy diet and incorporating regular movement into your day to lower your risk, but new research has found that a simple fitness tweak may help take your prevention game one step farther.
It involves strength training, which is good for your health in so many ways, from bone and brain health to faster metabolisms and better mobility. Still, if you’ve been looking for another sign that you should add more muscle-building activity to your life, you’ve found it.
Here’s what the new study discovered, plus why having muscles is so helpful for type 2 diabetes prevention.
Meet the experts: Christoph Buettner, MD, PhD, chief of the division of endocrinology at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School; Albert Matheny, RD, CSCS, co-founder of SoHo Strength Lab
What did the study find?
The scientific analysis was published in the journal BMC Medicine and crunched data from 141,848 people in Britain who didn’t have type 2 diabetes at the start of the study period.
The researchers looked at muscle strength (in the form of grip strength, a commonly-used marker of strength), along with each participant’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Over the course of seven years, 4,743 participants were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
The researchers found that people with high muscle strength had a 44 percent lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes during the study period compared to their weaker counterparts, even when they had a genetic risk of developing the disease. This, the researchers concluded, is a solid sign that more studies need to be done around the impact of strength training and type 2 diabetes risk.
How does muscle strength help reduce type 2 diabetes risk?
Muscles use glucose (blood sugar) and fats as a source of energy, explains Christoph Buettner, MD, PhD, chief of the division of endocrinology at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. As a result, having more muscle means you have less blood sugar and fat circulating around your body. “That help actually control diabetes,” he says.
Albert Matheny, RD, CSCS, co-founder of SoHo Strength Lab, agrees. “The more lean muscle mass you have, the better your body’s ability to manage your blood sugar,” he says.
But muscle strength can also reflect how healthy you are overall, Dr. Buettner points out. If you’re not particularly strong, it may suggest that you’re not overly active—and that alone can be a risk factor for developing type 2 diabetes.
How much muscle mass would you need to be effective?
That’s not clear. This particular study just looked at hand strength, and didn’t actually measure muscle mass in the participants. However, it’s fair to assume that doing your best to build up some muscle can help lower your risk of type 2 diabetes for the reasons we just listed.
What are the best ways (and workouts) to build muscle?
Creating a strength training routine you’ll stick with is always helpful, and it's a good idea to try to fit in two days of muscle-strengthening activities per week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
But if you’re just starting out, Matheny recommends focusing on lower body exercises. “That’s where the majority of muscle is, especially for women,” he says.
That means doing things like squats, deadlifts, and lunges. Once you get more comfortable with strength training, he suggests adding in more compound movements like pull-ups, bench presses, and reverse lunges.
Overall, Matheny says that adding strength training to your workout routine is always a good thing for your health—and you can just add "may lower your type 2 diabetes risk" to the myriad benefits.
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