BG During Exercise

After having read my guide on how to manage blood glucose levels before physical activity, you could now be asking yourself how to actually behave during your workout. 

As usual, when we talk about this topic, a macro-distinction between aerobic and anaerobic exercise has to be made.

Aerobic exercise, which is the one mainly composed by cardio or, more generally, with relatively long duration and medium to low intensity, such as running, football or swimming, is surely the one with the most relevant influence on our BG in the short term. In fact, while practising, you will nearly always notice a huge and fast drop in your blood glucose values: the effect will be exponentially more relevant if you already have active insulin in your body, and it is also important to remember that aerobic activity will accelerate the speed of your general insulin absorption in that moment. The power of these effects is directly proportional to the exercise's intensity. 

Instead, as for anaerobic activity, which is the one composed by efforts of short duration and high intensity, such as weight training, the immediate effects on your glycaemia will be extremely less relevant, if not absent at all. In some cases, you could even observe a rapid rise in your BG levels, usually ascribable to adrenaline or pre-ingested carbs/fats: this might also sometimes be true for aerobic exercise, and in this cases you should get yourself a bolus in order to prevent an hyperglicemia. However, injecting your insulin in a part of the body which you will train short after or which you have just trained will determine, also in this case, a much more rapid absorption. 

But did you know that, especially for this last kind of effort, the most relevant effects on our glycaemia are usually observed some hours after its conclusion? To know more about this topic, I suggest you go to my dedicated article. Thank you for reading!