Managing my blood glucose levels after weight lifting - georgia thompson
Hi, Paul Coker here from 1BloodyDrop.com. For those of you that don’t know me, I recently ran 40 half marathons to celebrate 40 years of living with type-1 diabetes. I’m now on a mission to create a leading resource for people with type-1 diabetes to learn about how to manage their diabetes whilst they’re exercising. Today, I’m here in Cardiff Athletic Creations with Georgia Thomson. She’s sharing her knowledge and experience of how she manages her diabetes during and after going to the gym and lifting heavy weights. Great for you to be here today, Georgia. Thank you for joining us.
On our previous video, you were talking about how you manage your diabetes during your weight training sessions. On this video, I’d like you to talk about how you manage your diabetes after being to a big gym session. What do you need to do? Do you need to make any changes to your insulin? Do you need to make any changes to your diet? Do you need to carb load? Do you need to protein load?
So after I finished training, I will test my blood sugar and react accordingly. If it’s too high, I will bolus to bring it down. If it’s too low, obviously, I will take glucose. I will always have carbohydrates and protein after I’ve trained. I don’t find the fats too important when it comes to post training but as long as I have carbohydrates and protein, I mean, you know, the fitness industry says you need to have protein within half an hour after you’ve trained. I don’t know whether there’s any truth in that or not. I’ve never done any research into it but I’m starving after I’ve trained, I want to eat.
Yeah. I get carbs and protein in me. Then, I just monitor my blood sugars as I would normally. I’m a big fan of, say, of knowing where I am all the time so I test normally every two to three hours. It’s just how I do things. I just carry that on. If my sugars are acting weird, so if I’m dropping or I’m always going high, and I will test more often until they come back within range and they settle down.
This, for me, is something that’s quite fundamentally important because when I go out for a long-distance run, it’s aerobic exercise and the model for aerobic exercise is quite different from the model for an aerobic exercise and for weightlifting in particular. For me, I carb load before I run, I carb load during my run. Then, after the run, I don’t carb load immediately because I have a lot of adrenaline flying around my system which pushes my blood glucose level wired up. I can’t carb load for a couple of hours until that adrenaline has started to drop away.
Do you experience a similar phenomenon when you’re in the gym lifting weights? Do your blood glucose levels go up after you’ve trained? Do they stay stable? Do they come down?
Generally, they stay stable. A lot of people will say that their sugars go up during weight training and after weight training. Mine, say, mine don’t. They stay stable. I guess that’s just how my body works.
Okay. Do you have to be careful in that post exercise period, particularly the night after you’ve exercised? If you’ve been to the gym and had a particularly strenuous session in the gym, are you more likely to go hypo in the night after gym session?
If I haven’t eaten properly post-session, then yeah, I will go hypo, but as long as I’ve eaten properly for that day, and then I’m generally oka