4 Diabetes Exercises You Can Perform at Home
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People with diabetes benefit from maintaining a healthy weight. It helps to lower blood sugar, improve health, and make you feel better. To accomplish this, safe dieting methods, such as restricting calories slightly or depriving yourself completely of certain food groups, are needed. It also controls your blood sugar levels to ensure that they’re not too high or low as you alter your eating habits.
Still, certified health coaches inform us that the best weight loss plans are those that don’t just focus on one’s diet—there needs to be exercise, too. Managing diabetes with diet and exercise helps you burn calories faster, aiding in weight loss. To add, diabetics benefit from exercise since it lowers blood pressure, harmful cholesterol, and triglycerides.
Given these, here are some diabetes exercises that you can do at home:
Resistance Band Exercises
Resistance bands are elastic bands specifically designed for strength training. Strength or resistance training helps your body better utilize insulin, reduce high blood sugar levels, and burn calories. Since this exercise only needs resistance bands, it can be easily done at home.
The American Diabetes Association recommends engaging in resistance band exercises at least 2 times a week. If you’re unsure where or how to start, a good tip is to do 2 sets of 15 repetitions for each resistance band exercise you perform. You can start by securing a band just above your knees. Do 15 kickbacks and then another, for a total of 30 kickbacks (2 sets).
Yoga
A study on yoga’s effects on diabetics concluded that it improved metabolic status, reduced abdominal obesity, and regulated glucose tolerance and lipid levels. Thus, it not only aids in weight loss but also keeps you healthy as a person with diabetes.
For this, you’d only need a yoga mat and a flat surface to work on. Some yoga moves to do are seated twisting poses, seated forward bend poses, and floor leg stretches. These target the abdomen, making them beneficial for losing weight in your core.
Dancing
Dancing is a form of cardio that sheds excess weight because of all the burned calories. For diabetics, it’s also a fun way to get a dose of physical activity, reduce stress, and improve flexibility.
This is a very versatile form of diabetes exercise, so you have a lot of options. Whether it is following a dance workout online, freestyling, or dancing hip-hop, anything is acceptable. For people with limited mobility, chair dancing is a great choice since it involves the use of a chair for added support. Zumba is a popular aerobic fitness dance exercise you can follow.
Tai Chi
Tai chi is a Chinese martial art practice involving physician stretching and exercise. While it is a martial art, it’s not intense. In fact, it uses a self-paced system of gentle movements to keep the body in motion. Research on tai chi’s benefits for diabetes found that it improved patients’ body mass index, lessened high blood sugar levels, and regulated blood pressure.
Tai chi is a standing exercise so you’ll only need free space at home to perform it. A few basic moves to start with are the commencing form, cloud hands, and single whip. Following a tai chi instructor such as in the video above may be more helpful if you’re a first-timer.
Physical activity is important for diabetics. Managing diabetes with diet and exercise not only lowers blood sugar levels but also improves your overall health and well-being.
It’s your turn!
What’re your fave one of these exercises?
Let me know in the comments or on Instagram @itsisabellem using #SugarWithIsabelle!
That’s it from us, 👋
AUTHOR’S BIO: Melaney Bowers.
I am a freelance writer who leans towards business and health writing. In my free time, I like taking morning walks, hiking with my dog, and trying new gluten-free recipes.
