It sounds like a nightmare from high school biology class. But, Glucose Metabolism is something you need to understand. Knowing the risks associated with this internal process can help you prevent disease and obesity. Knowing how to use it to your benefit, can help you sculpt a lean body and destroy excess body fat. Interested? Here’s how strength training can improve glucose metabolism and help you transform your body.
What is Glucose
Glucose is a form of sugar your body extracts from the foods you eat, especially carbohydrates. Commonly referred to as “blood sugar,” glucose is used for energy after it enters your bloodstream. It’s a necessity for your body to function correctly in a variety of ways.
What is Glucose Metabolism
As glucose enters your bloodstream, a combination of hormones helps your body store glucose as glycogen in your liver and muscles. The most notable of these hormones is Insulin. Stored glycogen is then converted to energy when your body needs it for physical activity, cell repair, and normal bodily functions. The entire process of converting glucose to energy is called Glucose Metabolism.
Risks of Excess Glucose
When you’re active, your body uses stored glucose for fuel. You reserve very little as your body uses what it needs for activity, energy and muscle repair.
However, when you’re inactive, or you frequently overeat (especially carbs and processed sugars), glucose floods your bloodstream. You can only store so much glucose as glycogen in your liver and muscles. So, what happens to the glucose that your liver and muscles can’t hold? Your body stores excess glucose, along with any other excess calories, as FAT.
And if you don’t know the risks of excess body fat, read this.
Even worse, when you flood your body with glucose and continuously elevate your blood sugar, insulin loses its effectiveness. You have a harder time converting glucose to energy, and your body creates more fat to handle the overload. You also run the risk of developing Type II Diabetes, which can lead to a world of health issues including skin disorders, vision complications, nerve damage and stroke.
But all is not lost…
Obesity, Type II Diabetes and Cardio
If you’re overweight or suffering from Type II diabetes, your first course of action will likely be to increase your daily cardio, under the supervision of a doctor of course. Cardio activities like walking, jogging, swimming, biking, and running are some of the best ways to reduce excess fat and improve blood sugar balance.
This is especially true if you’re not accustomed to working out or are untrained from a fitness perspective. While your exercise plan will be specific to your fitness level, the American College of Sports Medicine recommends working up to 30 minutes of moderate-intensity activity each day. As you exercise, your body consumes glucose and glycogen, which reduces the amount of excess sugar and fat in your body.
If you’re looking to get more impact out of each workout, you can up the intensity as you progress. High-intensity interval training (HIIT) like hill sprints, incline running, and other interval workouts increase the amount of energy you expend in a shorter amount of time as compared to steady-state cardio. As an added benefit, intense training can improve your strength, power, and lean muscle mass.
Role of Strength Training in Improving Glucose Metabolism
When you lift weights and use resistance training regularly, you build stronger muscle tissue. As you break muscle down during your workout, your body repairs your muscle fibers and makes them stronger than they were before. All this repair takes energy. Even better, just maintaining lean muscle takes energy throughout the day. The more lean muscle you have, the more fuel your body needs each day to support it.
The more muscle you build, the less excess energy your body needs to store as fat.
As with cardio, your body can use glucose and glycogen as an immediate energy source, as opposed to a source of excess body fat.
Why You Should Care about Glucose Metabolism
So, why should you care? I guess you can see by now the importance of cardio, resistance training and their impact on glucose metabolism:
- Simply put, glucose is energy
- Your body needs that energy for a variety of functions, including cardio, regular activity and maintaining muscle tissue
- Excess glucose is stored as fat and can lead to obesity and diseases such as Type II Diabetes
- The more active you are, and the greater amount of lean muscle tissue you have, the more energy your body consumes each day.
Less fat, less disease, and a lean body… Those sound like some pretty good reasons to me.
