Does Exercise Make A Difference To Blood Sugar Readings?

Unfortunately injury is something that happens to all athletes within their athletic career, and I’ve always been very lucky, that apart from an achilles problem mine have all been manageable. Hopefully the injury I picked up recently is no different. It’s certainly proved to be a lot more fun than previous injuries, if that’s the right word. I say this because it’s given me the opportunity to discover a new area of the sport previously relatively unknown to me… jogging!

Now you might think that as part of my training that I’d do a lot of jogging, but because my discipline is sprinting- jogging trains a different energy system and helps slower muscle fibres to develop, which is not what’s needed for speed. So why jog you might ask? Well the injury that I’ve picked up is an acute inflammation of one of the muscles near my hip. Which translates to that whilst I’m rehabilitating, the physiotherapist has suggested that I don’t raise my knees above 90 degrees, until the problem has subsided a bit. Which rules sprinting, weight lifting, bounding and some core stability movements out, hence the jogging.

As it won’t be long that I need to do it for, I’m really enjoying the new challenge of running/ jogging. The other thing I’m enjoying is the change in my blood sugar readings. In the days of initially doing the injury and seeing the physiotherapist, my blood sugars readings rose so much that I had to add 3 units to my background insulin requirements. That’s an increase of over 16%, never mind what I had to add with correction doses too. So anyone who wonders whether sport and exercise make a difference to blood sugar levels, I can categorically say that it does. I also found that my average blood sugar reading of when I train regularly is 10.9 mmol and that average goes back as much as 90 days prior to the injury. But my average reading during injury time but before running/ jogging was 11.5 mmol.

My new found rehab hobby of jogging has also helped me put my Protect it socks to the mileage test too. They were so comfortable I didn’t even know I was wearing them! Going from no ‘mileage’ to real distance running, my feet should have reacted quite sensitively to the change in training. As although the force of jogging versus running is not as great, it is prolonged which can make distance runners more blister prone. But there was not one single blister in sight and neither did I experience sweaty feet. Which is a true testament to the sock’s performance in this sunny weather! Foot care is very high on my list of priorities because of my diabetes and because of my athletic performance and my Protect it socks help me with that care and protection greatly.