Short Bursts of High Intensity Circuit + Plyometric Training Keeps Blood Sugar "In the Zone" - No Matter If Your Parents Were Obese Diabetics, Or Lean Athletes!

Circuit Train Your Way Out of the Type II Diabetes Trap - High Intensity Resistance Training + Plyometrics Work Regardless of "Bad Genes" | It's your Lifestyle not your destiny that determines whether you'll become and insulin resistant lifestyle diabetic or not.

While many people still believe that "cardio" training was the only way to keep your blood sugar levels under control, anyone who knows something about exercise physiology will argue that a highly anaerobic exercise regimen, just like high intensity resistance training, for example, should be a way more powerful blood glucose normalizer than a 20-40 minute jog.

I guess this was what Ryan D. Russell, Arnold G. Nelson, and Robert R. Kraemer must have had on their minds, as well, when they planned their most recent experiment. An experiment that was designed to (1) determine the clinical benefits of "high intensity-resistance-focused" exercise training (HIRFT) in  healthy young people (age 23.5; BMI 24.25kf/m²) and (2) elucidate whether these effects would differ between young people with and without a family history (FH) of type II diabetes, if the baseline fasting glucose levels were identical (6.67 mmol/L in the study at hand).

Using HIIT you can achieve similar results as in the study at hand

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Making HIIT a Hit Part II/II

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The study consisted of three main parts: (A) a pre-training test day including fasting blood glucose measurement followed by determination of an estimated one-repetition maximum (1- RM) for bench press, squats, and dead-lift, and twopost-workout blood glucose measurements; (B) 7-weeks of short, HIRFT using fast-paced superset circuit training, body core, and plyometrics training; and, (C) a post-training test day including fasting and post-exercise blood glucose and re evaluation of calculated maximal strength. Participants were instructed not to perform strenuous exercise, nor consume alcohol or caffeine at least two days prior to either test day.

Table 1: Overview of the weekly training schedule (Russel. 2014)

Fasting blood glucose was measured in order to establish at baseline to ensure participants are evenly matched and not pre-diabetic. In order to determine if HIRFT is an effective means of resistance training, a sub-group was randomized to perform traditional multi-set resistance training instead of the fast-paced circuits, and strength gains was compared.

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"Individual resistance exercises were the same between both modes of training, and included: squat, bench-press, lateral pull down/seated row, shoulder press, push-up, bicep curl, triceps extension, and dead-lift exercises performed in that order.

Time to complete each session of multi-set training was 40-minutes, including 1-minute of rest between sets; while each circuit training session was limited to 10-minutes excluding warm-up and cool-down with no rest between exercises.

All subjects completed the same plyometric and body core exercises. Core and plyometrics continually changed with increased fitness. Core was performed in less than 15 minutes, using weighted/resistance techniques including, but not limited to: dumbbell sit-ups, medicine-ball toss, rolling on ab wheel (or barbell), and plank positions.

Plyometric workouts were completed in 50 minutes, and utilized short bouts of explosive movements with several minutes of rest between. Some workouts included: stadium sprints, clapping push-ups, box jumps, obstacle hops, ramp-runs, and various fast medicine ball and dumbbell movements.

The participants were encouraged to drink water ad-libitum before, during, and after workouts. Training progression was continuously monitored and load adjusted for all participants in both exercise groups to ensure continued progression, enabling all participants to continue to work out at 65-85% of 1RM (8-12 reps; to failure on last set) throughout training.

Figure 1: Strength gains (righ) and blood sugar reductions (left) correlate negatively (Russel. 2014)

While the specific HIRT circuit training showed significant reductions in fasting blood-glucose (p < 0.05), there were no differences in fasting, post-exercise, and 10-min recovery blood glucose concentrations between FH and CON.

Strength increased from pre to post training similarly in both groups, while fasting blood glucose concentrations decreased with training overall (p = 0.0054), with no differences between FH and CON groups (p = 0.7). Last but not least, the scientists found an inverse correlation between percent strength gains and decreased blood glucose concentrations from pre- to post-training (r= -0.519, p = 0.05), which indicates that the strength gains and thus eventually the training success determined the health improvements (measured as reductions in blood glucose levels).

Suggested read: "Isn't High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) For Everyone? Study Puts "!" Behind "Personalized Training" - Fitness, Fatness, Age & More Determine Its Effective- & Usefulness" | read more

Bottom line: The study at hand demonstrates having a family history of type II diabetes is a lame excuse not to avoid having blame yourself for developing diabetes, when you are too lazy to go to gym to give your body a chance to burn off some of the sugary garbage you're shoveling down your piehole whole day, just like your sick relatives did.

Apropos "burning glucose", I am not sure why people still believe that it would always take endless, boring cardio sessions to ward off diabesity, when it's resistance training that depletes your intramuscular and hepatic glycogen stores to make room for the dietary glucose that would otherwise build up in your bloodstream until your organs are sugar-coated.

Reference:

• Russel, et al. "Short bouts of high-intensity resistance-style training produce similar reductions in fasting blood glucose of diabetic offspring and controls." Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research (2014). Publish Ahead of Print - DOI: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000000624