Building Lean Muscle When You Have or Had Diabetes – It IS Possible! By David Andrews
As you go about your fitness program, it’s a must that you are focusing on building more lean muscle mass.
What’s so important about this?
There are a few good reasons why this should be one of your top goals.
First, lean muscle mass tissue is what keeps your metabolic rate strong.
The more lean muscle mass you have, the faster your resting metabolic rate will be and the easier it will be to maintain your goal body weight.
Since much of controlling diabetes is about keeping your weight in check, as you can see, this only works in your favor.
Second, having more lean muscle mass also boosts your insulin sensitivity levels. Muscle is ready to take up carbohydrates you eat and store it as muscle glycogen for your next workout, so it essentially creates a large storage space for all these carbohydrates to go.
Finally, the more lean muscle mass you have, the stronger and more capable you will be. This can help you sustain your functional abilities as you get older. Most people lose lean muscle mass with age, but with the right training approach, you can reverse that trend.
Now, as someone with diabetes, you may wonder if you can build muscle. After all, doing so is going to involve two things: weight training and eating more carbohydrates and calories.
Won’t this cause issues for your diabetes?
Not if you’re wise it doesn’t have to. First remember that when you are weight lifting, your body will readily be utilizing glucose that you consume, so it’s usually okay to eat more carbohydrates before you lift. This will give you plenty of energy for the session to come and ensure that you are performing as optimally as possible.
Second, immediately after your weight lifting workout, your body will be especially prone to putting glucose in the muscle tissues, so here again, you won’t have to worry about carbohydrates spiking your blood sugar levels as much.
As someone with diabetes, your strategy should be to eat the bulk of your daily carbohydrates at these two points during the day – pre and post workout.
You might put 50 grams in the meal before the workout and 75-100 grams in the meal or two that follows (usually you should have a post workout shake containing 25-50 grams and then a meal after that containing another 25-50 grams). This will give you around 150 grams of carbohydrates total, which is a good number to be at for building muscle.
Then the rest of your day, be sure that you are taking in sufficient calories from proteins and healthy fats. As long as you do that, you should have no problem building lean muscle mass over time. You may not build it quite as fast as someone who can create a higher calorie surplus by eating more carbohydrates all throughout the day, but you will make progress nonetheless and that’s the really important thing here. As long as you are moving forward and seeing results, that should be enough to keep you motivated and pushing forward.
So change your gym routine focus. If all you worry about is losing weight, stop and consider reversing your goals for a while and focus on building some lean muscle mass instead. It may just do you a lot of good
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