6 Ultimate BENEFITS OF EXERCISE For Diabetes, Insulin, Weight Loss, Your Brain & More

best exercise for diabetes insulin
resistance and weight loss everywhere you turn someone tells you to
exercise but why what are the benefits and if they tell you its calories or no
pain no gain or to lose weight they are telling you the wrong thing so we’re
going to go over different principles of exercise that you get the big picture
and you can start exercising the way that’s going to make you healthy coming
right up so how do you exercise the right way or even more importantly how
do you avoid exercising the wrong way as we’re going to talk about there are ways
to exercise that will actually worsen your diabetes your insulin resistance
and your ability to lose weight so we absolutely don’t want to go there but we
need to understand some basic things first the first thing is that what are
these three things diabetes insulin resistance and weight loss what do they
have in common and the answer is hormones they have hormone imbalances
the system has been pushed out of balance over a period of time until it
doesn’t have the ability to regulate itself under those conditions and those
hormones are primarily insulin cortisol and human growth hormone insulin is a
storage hormone it responds to blood sugar and whenever blood sugar rises
insulin rises so that the insulin can guide the blood sugar out of the
bloodstream and into the cells all of these diabetes insulin resistance and
weight loss – and we should emphasize we’re talking about type 2 diabetes here
all of them have too high an insulin the second hormone is cortisol cortisol is a
stress hormone in response to stress your body wants to increase the ability
to produce energy and the fastest source of energy in an emergency is glucose so
cortisol response to stress cortisol increases glucose and glucose in turn
stimulates insulin so insulin of course is the main problem here but cortisol
contributes it adds to the production of insulin under stress and exercise is
stressed so we need to understand how to maximize the hormonal benefits and
reduce the negatives the third hormone is human growth
hormone and human growth hormone is a rejuvenating hormone it’s a muscle
sparing muscle building hormone and it’s a hormone that increases metabolism so
if you can workout and increase your human growth hormone then your
metabolism stays higher between workouts so it has nothing to do with the
calories that you burn during the workout it has to do with are you moving
closer to balance and are you improving or worsening your metabolism so these
three hormones are what we’re going to talk about and that’s what we have to
understand that all of these issues are about hormones and insulin is primary
and diabetes insulin resistance and weight loss cortisol and human growth
hormone are critical in response to exercise how do we exercise to get these
two principle number two is about insulin resistance so traditional we
hear that if you exercise you become more insulin sensitive you reduce your
insulin resistance and that’s only a little bit true because you can be
insulin resistant at the level of the muscles or you can be insulin resistance
at the level of the liver and exercise is going to help the muscles become more
insulin sensitive during exercise while the muscles are active they become
hungrier for fuel they want more fuel so they sort of bypass this rule that says
we need insulin to bring the glucose in the muscles say during exercise I’m
gonna let the glucose in anyway because I really want that fuel right now so the
muscles become much more insulin sense so in terms of blood glucose it will
help lower blood glucose with a low level exercise because it will pull the
sugar straight out of the bloodstream long term for insulin resistance it does
nothing because the main part of the insulin resistance is the liver the
liver is clogged up the liver is packed up its said no I don’t want any more
fuel I can’t handle any more fuel that’s where the insulin that’s the basis of
the insulin resistance and exercise that’s really nothing to reduce that
long term insulin resistance so yes exercise is good but just walking unless
you do something else to address the liver insulin resistance it not going to
have a major impact on your overall insulin resistance so the regular
guidelines the American Diabetes Association this is principle number
three that we need to understand what not to do and just because they’re
official guidelines doesn’t mean they’re right they recommend moderate to
vigorous exercise five times a week at least thirty minutes or they say if your
busy schedule doesn’t allow that then you can do a ten-minute brisk walk after
each meal so first of all there’s a huge difference in hormone responses between
moderate and vigorous exercise we’ll come to that in a second moderate to low
and low to moderate intensity is okay that will help you vigorous will come
back to bite you and if you do a ten-minute brisk walk after each meal
what happens after a meal what does your body want to do after a meal it wants to
sit around and digest that food so you put food in your body and your body says
okay I get I get it this food is here we need to allocate resources to digest
that so it starts making stomach acid it starts allocating the
blood it redirects the blood to the intestinal tract
it sends more blood to the all the internal organs so that they can make
enzymes and they can start preparing and digesting and absorbing this food but if
you go for a brisk walk right after each meal because you’re so busy now the
resources are being required elsewhere now you don’t have the blood you don’t
have the resources you’re not going to make the stomach acid you’re not going to make
the digestive enzymes and what do you get now now you get GERD reflux
heartburn you get digestive upset you get irritable bowel syndrome you get
leaky gut and the list goes on and on and on if you don’t already have a bad
digestive system this would be a recipe to create one so we have to understand
the wisdom of the body that it always knows what to do in different situations
and we can’t force it to do different things than what it’s designed to do
even in so-called informed camps like even among chiropractors they still talk
about calories I saw this on a video that
oh yeah walking is good for you it’ll burn 170 calories in 30 minutes and if
you run then you get the results better that’s faster and stair-climbing burns
two to three times the calories of just walking so they’re stuck in this mindset
that it’s about calories it’s about punishing the body it’s about more is
better no pain no gain etc so we’re gonna debunk this and understand how
this stuff really works so the main thing to understand is that
there’s three basic broad divisions of exercise of how it affects so the first
one is aerobic aerobic means with air and when you do aerobic exercise that’s
something that you can keep up for a very very long time you can do it for an
hour 90 minutes to 3 hours even if you enjoy it because you have fuel in the
body and providing oxygen you’re providing air as
an aerobic at the rate where your body can keep up for the level of intensity
of exercise you need a certain amount of oxygen as long as you can provide that
amount of oxygen you’re not falling behind you’re keeping up you’re not
getting lactic acid you can breathe at a comfortable rate you can maintain a
conversation you can speak a full sentence or at least a part big part of
a sentence while you’re doing it and that means your body is in balance there
is no crisis there is no significant stress you are exercising but you’re not
punishing your body that’s aerobic exercise and aerobic exercise means
without air it means you can’t breathe fast enough to at a normal pace to keep
up and even if you start breathing faster then you’re not producing enough
energy with that oxygen to provide for the activity you’re doing the activity
is too intense so you’re falling behind now the body has to start breaking down
glucose instead of fat and you’re producing lactic acid as a byproduct of
of that activity so the way you know is if you start panting and your muscles
start burning you are in the end aerobic mode in the aerobic mode the
body’s preferred fuel is fat in the anaerobic mode the fat isn’t enough
because the fat is burned by oxygen and when that’s not enough anymore you got
to start breaking down glycogen and glucose through the glycolytic the sugar
breakdown pathways now a byproduct is lactic acid you start panting and the
muscles are burning this one if you really want to punish yourself then you
can keep that up for maybe thirty minutes some people are just really good
at suffering so they might keep it up for sixty minutes or even maybe longer
like a marathon if your life depends on it but that’s a
very stressful state and a lot of exercise that’s being recommended is an
aerobic because we have this idea that of no pain no gain that the benefits of
exercise are only proportional to how much I suffer and that’s simply not true
you can get some fitness benefit from it but you’re stressing your body at a very
high level and one example of this is all the people who are overweight
middle-aged they have skinny legs they have the big belly called the adrenal
body type or the apple body type these people are already too high in cortisol
the producing cortisol cortisol is triggering insulin insulin is packing
the fat back onto the liver and the the middle of the body these people do not
want to do anaerobic exercise and yet when they go to the gym and they
seek the help of a professional they’re told you need to do boot camp and they
new aerobics and do the spin class and they do circuit training and they keep
their heart rate at much too high a level and they’re producing too much
cortisol they are actually making things worse so what happens when you’re making
a lot of cortisol is your body is burning through the sugar you’re making
glucose you are packing the excess back on the body and then as a result you get
way way hungrier than you were before you get out of control hungry so the
cortisol packed the fat back on the body and now you overcompensate by eating to
make up for the fat that was packed on so you’re perpetuating a vicious cycle
and you’re actually getting fatter and fatter and fatter and your midsection is
growing the harder you work because you are exhausting your adrenals and you’re
making too much cortisol and then there’s a third type of exercise which
is high intensity interval training and this is an aerobic
exercise but it’s at such an intense level that you can’t keep it up more
than a few minutes even if your life depended on it you just crash that’s how
intense it is so why would you want to do one or the other of these and how do
you recognize what they are well aerobic we talked about you breathe
slowly and you can keep it up for hours that means your heart rate is at about
60% of your maximum heart rate so let’s take a 20 30 year-old or for most people
20 to 40 let’s say their aerobic limit is going to be about a hundred and
twenty maybe a hundred and thirty beats per minute of heart rate at that level
you can still speak comfortably you can keep it up for a very long time the
anaerobic now you’re falling behind you’re craving air and your heart tries
to compensate by increasing the heart rate it’s pumping faster and faster and
faster and now you’re somewhere between sixty to eighty so now these are people
that if you measure the heart rate it would be like a hundred and thirty to
one hundred and fifty hundred and sixty and you can maintain that for for a good
bit hit however high-intensity interval training is when you get close to a
hundred percent you go in all-out you’re maxing it out you’re pushing it and
normally you would do that in like 30-second increments you do it thirty
seconds you rest thirty seconds or a minute you do another thirty seconds and
each time you’re pushing the heart rate higher and higher until at the last one
or two of those intervals you hit more than ninety five percent of your maximum
heart rate so your maximum heart rate is somewhere around 220 minus your age so
you should be able to get within a few points of that so I’m for example I’m 55
and my maximum heart rate theoretically would be about one
sixty-five now I’ve done this for a while so I’ve sort of maintained a
higher heart rate higher maximum heart rate and I can still get my heart rate
to a hundred and seventy five but if you get within the ballpark you’re doing
pretty good and the total duration of that should not be more than a couple of
three minutes if you add up all the time that you are above 80 percent heart rate
eighty to a hundred percent it shouldn’t be more than just a few minutes what are
the benefits well we said that the benefits are hormonal the benefit you’re
looking for is growth hormone growth hormone is rejuvenating its fat burning
it increases metabolism so aerobic exercise any activity will increase it
just a little bit and aerobic because you can keep it up so long still has a
significant or at least modest impact on growth hormone not a huge impact but it
does something anaerobic has a greater impact because
it’s higher intensity it’s pushing the body and you still you get more benefit
because you can keep it up for a longer period of time but high-intensity
interval training produces a tremendous and enormous a fantastic amount of human
growth hormone in a few seconds duration if you can get up to that maximum level
for even a few seconds you can increase your growth hormone by three to four
hundred percent and that’s the beauty of this that it doesn’t have to go on very
long and also hormone decreases very very slowly once the body produces
growth hormone it wants it to stick around for a while and it only decreases
at a level that it’s still detectable it still increased 48 to 72 hours later
insulin on the other hand goes away in seconds because its purpose is to manage
the blood sugar the present moment as soon as that blood
sugar is gone insulin is gone unless you become very insulin resistant and now it
stays up because it’s just not working so that’s human growth hormone let’s
look at cortisol and cortisol is a stress hormone it increases blood sugar
and indirectly it drives insulin so aerobic exercise when you are
comfortable when you can speak a sentence when you can’t breathe normally
you are not stressing your body you’re not putting your body in a place where
it’s urgently looking for more resources it’s keeping up it’s doing fine so the
cortisol is virtually zero it is essentially baseline cortisol the body
sees no reason to change anything because it’s keeping up when you do an
aerobic now it’s proportional the cortisol is proportional to how much you
increase it but as soon as you start huffing and puffing your body is not
burning fat for fuel it is switching more so over to carbohydrates and now
you are creating cortisol you are changing from a fat-burning to a
carbohydrate burning metabolism and the cortisol goes through the roof so
anytime that you’re having to pant you’re going to increase it but here the
idea is no pain no gain so you’re supposed to keep it up as long as you
can spin class might last 45 minutes or an hour so you’re making cortisol for a
very long time and I’ve seen some information that oh don’t worry cortisol
it’s only for an hour that is not correct
okay cortisol for a second or a minute that’s fine but if it goes on for hours
you’re really really stressing your body now here’s the beauty about high
intensity interval training even though it is the highest level of stress even
though it is the highest level of cortisol need it goes on for such a
short period of time that the total stress on the body
is not significant not on the hormone system and because growth hormone stays
up so long you only need to do this for a few minutes two to three times a week
and with a total duration of only a few minutes per week your cortisol
production is very very slight what you want to do here is you want to focus
obviously on aerobic and hit and we’ll talk next about what are some different
examples of of these exercises so the aerobic that you can kind of figure
this out for yourself but just a simple example walking biking swimming rowing
gardening stair climbing depending on the intensity if you have a shallow set
of stairs and you’re walking up slowly then you can still stay in aerobic if
it’s steeper stairs and you’re hurrying then obviously you’re moving into an
aerobic jogging or running big question mark ninety-five percent of people
cannot jog and stay in the aerobic mode if you can run and speak a complete
sentence then you’re okay that these are people who are elite runners they can
run really fast really long but if they run super slow then they’re still in
aerobic mode most people cannot jog or run and be in aerobic mode and because
it’s gentle you want to keep this up for 30 to 90 minutes at a time if you have
you can do as much as you have time for because it doesn’t where the body
significantly and I wouldn’t recommend ever doing anything every day I think
it’s good to give the body a break even from the gentle stuff so I’d say five to
six three to five to six times a week an anaerobic are things like aerobics class
spin class tennis soccer anything where you’re gonna sweat profusely you’re
going to pant more of the time than not and it’s gonna be something that you
keep up for more than if minutes that’s anaerobic and my
advice is unless you’re a tennis player who really enjoy that and you do it for
a reason other than exercise I mean obviously if you love it and it’s your
thing do it but don’t do these things to try to get healthy if you have diabetes
insulin resistance or weight loss or if you have adrenal fatigue then you want
to avoid this category as much as possible you could do a minute or two
here and there then it sort of starts moving a little bit toward the
high-intensity but don’t try to do this as a sustained activity it will not
improve your health it can improve your fitness but there’s not there’s a
difference between fitness and health and we have to understand that
high-intensity exercise so this depends on your health this depends on your
fitness this depends on if you have aches and pains so you have to be
cautious you have to start gradually if you’re hurting then you can’t go out and
do sprints but figure this play with it and figure
out what you can do the one of the safest things is a stationary bike that
it’s it’s a little bit limiting because it’s hard to get way up to your maximum
heart rate but it’s a safe way to start so you sit down you pedal for 30 seconds
as fast as you can you take a short break and you get right back at it again
if you’re outdoors biking then I would suggest going uphill find yourself a
steep hill and you go as fast as you can up that hill like the life depended on
it then you could roll back down and then
you go right back up as fast as you can I do this mostly with Sprint’s because I
enjoy running I’ll go to a course and on a trail and I’ll jog very gently to keep
it under a hundred and 20 and then when I find a nice big hill I start sprinting
and I just keep sprinting for a minute or two until I hit a very high
heart rate and I’m done that’s my workout that’s my hit workout if I hit
my maximum heart rate 165 170 175 I made my growth hormone I’m done then I walk
or jog keeping my heart rate below 120 for the rest of that workout other
things you can do our burpees like you do get down to a push-up stand up jump
up get down to a push-up and so forth involving most of the muscles in the
body the more muscles you can involve the easier it is for your body to reach
this this high heart rate you can also do it with weights if you do something
it’s not necessarily for heart rate but if you do weights then you want to do
heavy weights until you fail basically and that’s to get the hit weight
training in general is a good thing because you’re stressing the body you’re
imposing a demand that produces growth hormone anytime that you stress the body
to where it has to change something you’re making more growth hormone so
resistance training is a good thing also just don’t turn it into a circuit
training where your heart rate is up for 30-40 minutes because now you fall right
back in here when you do the weights your time of fatigue your time of
exertion should still be very short the time where you’re close to failing
should be very short so this I would recommend less than three minutes about
two to three times a week so with this understanding that it’s about hormones
it’s about insulin resistance and obviously you want to combine this with
a low carb diet because carbohydrates will trigger insulin which is the the
source of this problem in the first place but it’s about hormones it’s about
knowing that exercise triggers different hormones it’s about knowing how the
different intensity exercises triggers desirable and undesirable
hormones now we can balance it we do a lot of aerobic we do very little
anaerobic and we do a tiny tiny little bit of extreme intensity and now we’ve
gotten the best of the best and not so much of the worst so finally number
seven we want to talk about the actual benefits of exercise and these are in
reverse order and this is probably not something that you have ever heard
because everyone tells you that you exercise to burn calories if you go on a
thousand websites 990 of them are gonna mention calories first but even though
it does burn some calories first of all it’s not the goal the goal is to get the
body in balance and the calories that you burn only are a benefit if you are
reducing insulin resistance at the same time if you are doing a low carb diet if
you’re doing intermittent fasting then you’re reducing insulin resistance if
you’re not then you’re doing what the Biggest Loser people are doing you are
doing all anaerobic that one are saying you are but they did all an aerobic
exercise they did calorie restriction they did not reduce their insulin
resistance at the level of the liver they only did it at the level of the
muscles so they reduced their blood sugar they became non-diabetic while
they were punishing their bodies six hours a day but as soon as they stopped
they have really had and changed their insulin resistance significantly and
because of that their basal metabolic rate crashed they totally crashed their
metabolism their bodies were desperate to get back to that original weight and
that’s what happened for most of them so it does not help to burn calories if
you’re not low lowering your insulin because all that’s going to happen then
is you lower your basal metabolic rate and then you’re going to fight forever
to your body’s gonna fight to gain the
weight back and you’re gonna fight to keep it down and you’re gonna lose it
does help if you are addressing insulin resistance
it does help burn calories in the sense that you have a certain stored amount of
fuel in your liver and on your body and as long as you’re getting rid as long as
you’re lowering the insulin you are helping the balance between feeding and
burning so the problem with most people is they feed more than they burn and
they become insulin resistant so it will help you burn more in that sense but
only if you address the insulin at the same time that’s the least important
benefit of exercise number two benefit is circulation it increases circulation
when you have if you go out for a walk if your basic heart rate is about 60 to
70 your your resting heart rate and then you go for a walk it doesn’t feel like
you’re doing anything but your heart rate is about 120 you basically doubled
your heart rate but not only that the heart now also squeezes harder it has a
higher stroke volume so between 50 to 100 percent increased stroke volume
depending on your fitness level so that means even walking you’re increasing
your circulation by 3 to 4 times 3 to 400 percent and that’s a tremendous
increase what the circulation do it the blood is your transportation system it
delivers stuff and it picks up stuff and to the degree that the blood is
circulating you can clean up so you get a tremendous benefit in terms of detox
cleaning up waste products debris metabolites fourth benefit fourth and
fifth are hormones and like I said these are an increasing order of benefit as
far as the profound effect they have on your health growth hormone we talked
about it is muscle building it increases metabolism and what these
growth hormone and BDNF brain-derived neurotrophic factor what they do
together is they allow the brain to make new synapses it allows repair and even
growth of your brain every time you learn something your body reconfigures
your neural pathways these little threads that carry messages and help you
learn things every time you learn something you got to reconfigure you
have to make new synapses but that can only happen if you have growth hormone
and BDNF present so exercise helps increase these hormones so exercise
makes you smarter exercise helps you fight dementia exercise helps you fight
memory loss it makes you better at learning better at focusing number six
is brain benefits and what does that mean it means that your brain is tissue
your brain consists of cells just like every other part of your body so we
think of muscles when we think of growth we we know that if we if we work out a
muscle that muscle will tend to stay strong or grow stronger if we don’t if
we hurt our arm if we break an arm we put it in a cast then four weeks later
when the cast comes off the muscles are gone use it or lose it so we understand
that with muscles but it’s equally or more true with the brain the difference
is muscles do mechanical work the brain does signal work the brain is two
percent of your body weight it uses 20% of your calories 20% of your oxygen etc
so working out moving the body provides 90% of the
signals that keep the brain alive the signals that’s the juice that’s the
stimulation that’s the use-it-or-lose-it for the brain so if you want a strong
if you want pumped brain cells you gotta activate it and motion and exercise is
what does that 90% of the signals that the brain is provided 90 percent of the
signals that reach the brain that keep the brain alive are from movement that’s
why you exercise I can’t emphasize that enough forget everything else you’ve
ever heard about the benefits and just remember that movement stimulates your
brain and when your brain grows stronger especially the frontal lobe which is
your cognitive center which is your motivation which is your management your
abstract thought it’s what makes you human
when that brain gets stronger by this activation it helps balance your stress
responses it helps balance your sympathetic and your parasympathetic
nervous system and because of that improved balance now is why you feel
better now is why your mood improves your focus
improves you are strengthening cells you’re improving neural networks you’re
less prone to get dementia you’re managing stress better your healing
better because of the balance between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic
I have separate videos on that that will go into more detail and it will also
help your digestion because that’s all about sympathetic parasympathetic that’s
how you exercise whether you want to do it for weight loss diabetes insulin
resistance or just overall health there’s really not that much difference
and yes you should exercise for all those reasons but the primary benefit is
to keep your brain alive and to get all the benefits of a healthier brain if you
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