Weight Training will reduce your chances to get diabetes
With the booming popularity of weight-lifting DVD’s like P90X and Insanity, many men — the target audience of these videos — have made strength training their only form of exercise. As it turns out, working to bulk up those muscles not only helps build strength and prevent age-related muscle loss, but may help ward off type 2 diabetes as well.
In fact, it may work nearly as well as steady aerobic exercise such as walking, swimming, and biking.
That’s what Harvard School of Public Health researchers found when they followed more than 32,000 men for nearly two decades: Those who reported doing 30 minutes a day of resistance training at the beginning of the study had a 34 percent decrease in their diabetes risk compared with those who didn’t exercise. Men who did 30 minutes a day of aerobic activity had a 52 percent lower risk of diabetes compared with couch potatoes, according to the study published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
The best form of exercise when it comes to diabetes prevention? Doing a combination of steady exercise and weight training for at least 30 minutes a day on most days of the week. Study participants who did both had nearly a 60 percent reduction in their diabetes risk.
(Among all the men, about 7 percent developed diabetes during the study.)
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