Study Drop: Try THIS to Reduce Your Risk for Diabetes

by Anna Matlby


Bill Diodato
Bill Diodato

If you're young and fit, type 2 diabetes may not be on your radar -- but it might be in the future. The disease has seen an epidemic-proportion increase in prevalence in the U.S. over the last few decades, and it's currently the seventh leading cause of death. Scary, right?

Well, here's some awesome news on how you can beat it: Muscle-strengthening exercise may significantly reduce your risk for developing type 2 diabetes. Researchers in PLoS Medicine report this week that middle-aged and older women who completed more than 150 minutes per week of muscle-strengthening activity (that's about 2.5 yoga classes' worth!) had a 30 to 40 percent lower risk for type 2 diabetes than did women who did zero muscle-strengthening work. That's pretty cool, because while we already knew that aerobic exercise helps reduce T2D risk, we weren't sure if anaerobic exercise had a link to the disease.

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"While it is well established that aerobic exercise is beneficial for diabetes prevention, it was unknown to what extent muscle-strengthening type activity would confer benefit," study author Anders Grontved, MPH, told SELF. "An important message from our study is that for those women who have difficulty in adhering or engaging in aerobic activity, muscle-strengthening type activity such as resistance exercise could be a valuable alternative with respect to diabetes prevention."

Even cooler: If you do both cardio and strength training, you could reduce your risk for T2D by up to 70 percent!

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So why are weights so great for reducing one's diabetes risk? Could be that strengthening your muscles helps improve their sensitivity to insulin, says Dr. Grontved. (Just a quick lil' health lesson: With type 2 diabetes, either your body doesn't produce enough insulin -- a hormone that regulates blood sugar -- or your cells ignore it, which causes your blood glucose levels to rise to unhealthy levels.)

"Engaging in muscle-strengthening activity is likely to have a substantial effect on improving and maintaining the body's tissues' sensitivity to insulin," Dr. Grontved says.

"Another important mechanism is [muscle-strengthening's] influence on energy balance," he says. In other words, it helps you burn calories and avoid being overweight or obese.

While the researchers didn't get details on the women's specific types of activity, they recommend resistance exercise (which could be bodyweight exercises, weight lifting, or some other type of load-bearing workout) and low-intensity conditioning such as yoga.

It doesn't hurt that strengthening your muscles helps you look and feel like a total badass, either.

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