This article and accompanying video are going to be simple and straight to the point and you need to pay attention because this could be a matter of life or death.
You are going to learn exactly how to lower your blood sugar/A1c levels.
Pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes amongst 35-55-year-olds is growing at an exponential rate.
The majority of people living in 2022 exist somewhere on the diabetic spectrum whether cognizant of it or not.
If you have been to the doctor recently and your A1C levels came back high, you need to address this immediately or you will soon succumb to the long miserable diabetic death.
I don’t mean to sound dramatic when I say that, but even pre-diabetes is not to be messed with and can quickly turn into full-blown diabetes.
My girlfriend’s father was diagnosed two years ago and those two years flew by and ended with a leg amputation.
I say this to warn you about how quickly pre-diabetes can turn into diabetes and drastically change the course of your life forever.
High Blood Sugar & Hemoglobin A1C
The CDC classifies a hemoglobin A1C level of 5.7-6.4 as pre-diabetic.
Anything below 5.7 is considered normal and anything above 6.5 is considered grounds for a type 2 diagnosis.
So what exactly does the A1C test measure?
Well, it is an average of your blood sugar levels over the past 3 months.
When sugar enters your bloodstream, it attaches to hemoglobin which is a protein in your red blood cells.
Everybody has some sugar attached to their hemoglobin, but people with higher blood sugar levels have more of it attached.
The A1C test measures the percentage of your red blood cells that have sugar-coated hemoglobin.
How Do You Lower Your A1C levels?
In order to lower your A1C levels, you need to upregulate your glucose clearance capacity.
What this means is that you need to train your body to clear glucose more efficiently so that it does not cause metabolic damage which ultimately leads to type 2 diabetes.
Exercise is bar-none the best tool we have in our lifestyle modification toolbox for lowering blood sugar levels and A1C levels.
And we are going to get into how you should exercise to lower your A1C but first, we need to do a quick dive into carbohydrate metabolism.
Carbohydrate Metabolism and the Heart Disease Connection
When you ingest carbohydrates or sugar, your body needs to store that energy in your cells.
So it hires a hormone called insulin to help carry the glucose to the right place.
But when someone is pre-diabetic or diabetic, they begin to lose their sensitivity to insulin.
The result is more sugar in your bloodstream which damages your blood vessels by causing them to become hard.
Also known as atherosclerosis.
And this is precisely why high blood sugar and heart disease are so closely linked.
Trust me, you don’t want this – so you need to get on top of it.
The Best Way to Lower High Blood Sugar and A1C levels
The best way to lower high blood sugar and A1C levels is to exercise.
In order to enhance glucose clearance and thus lower your blood sugar levels, we need to make your mitochondria more efficient.
The mitochondria are the organelles in every cell of your body that produce ATP.
ATP is the universal source of energy for your body.
In order to get those mitochondria functioning more efficiently again, we need to implement a specific zone of exercise which we will call Zone 2 training.
From a cellular standpoint, Zone 2 training is the highest level of energy that you can put out while keeping lactate under 2.0mmol.
Now, what does all that fancy stuff mean?
The Blood Sugar – Lactate Connection
We aren’t going to go super deep into the biochemistry of this but I’ll do my best to give the reader’s digest version.
When your body is undergoing cellular respiration, you are converting glucose or fatty acids from your food into ATP.
As I mentioned before, ATP is the universal energy that your body uses to fuel all bodily processes.
This process is done really efficiently with oxygen.
However, as the demand for ATP gets higher and higher your body will make biochemical tradeoffs to make this energy through various complex pathways.
The byproduct of these tradeoffs is lactate.
Zone 2 Training & Lactate
Lactate is a proxy for when the demand for energy is exceeding the mitochondria’s capacity.
Lactate spills into the blood instead of being reused in the muscle to make more ATP.
It is essentially an artifact of cellular respiration.
This is important because it lets you know which zone you are in.
And you find out by measuring lactate in your blood with a blood lactate meter.
Once you exceed 2.0mmol, you have exceeded the mitochondria’s ability to clear the lactate that it produces.
And if you want your mitochondria to be in peak shape for clearing lactate and also glucose, you need to be training in the precise zone I just mentioned.
The next question of course becomes, well how do I know I am in Zone 2?
Lower Blood Sugar: The Correct Exercise Intensity for Zone 2 Training
Well, the most precise way is to measure your lactate levels with a lactate meter.
This will tell you exactly when you are in the sweet spot of around 1.8-2.0mmol of Lactate.
And I’m going to do a video soon breaking this process down exactly so that you can be really precise and effective with your approach.
But for now, let’s forget all of that and give you the simple approach so you can start making changes to your blood sugar levels today.
You can approximate zone 2 by simply gauging your subjective intensity.
You can get into zone 2 by exercising at an intensity that allows you to hold a conversation but just barely.
You don’t want to be gassed at all.
You should be able to do the whole session on a call with a friend.
However, it should be challenging enough so that you are at least experiencing some labored breathing.
For most people who are really out of shape, this is going to be walking at a fast pace at a slight incline or cycling at a moderate pace on an exercise bike.
How Often Should You Exercise to Decrease Your High Blood Sugar and A1C Levels?
Now that we talked about intensity, we need to talk about dose.
You need to be getting in 3-4 zone 2 sessions per week in order to see meaningful changes in your blood glucose levels and A1C.
The duration needs to be 30 min – 1 hour in length depending on your current fitness.
I recommend that people who haven’t been exercising in a long time – start with three 30 minute sessions at a brisk walk.
Preferably on a treadmill or bike where you can maintain the same speed, incline, or resistance.
For the moderately in-shape person, this is going to involve 30 minutes – 1 hour at a slow jog.
Again, you want to be conversational and not completely out of breath.
But the pace should be constant and you will need to experiment with what puts you into that sweet spot of not too intense but not too easy.
Over time you will be able to gauge the correct intensity for your body.
Ideally, you want to get in three 1 hour sessions per week.
At first, an hour may seem insane.
But as you improve your fitness it will be super easy.
Exercise Strategy for High Blood Sugar Recap
Remember, zone 2 is not about killing yourself with intensity.
It’s that consistent moderate pace that we are looking for.
How that is expressed in terms of your speed is a function of your fitness level.
So for example, a world-class cyclist will be performing zone 2 at a pace that would seem like sprinting to you or me.
It’s important to remember that your zone 2 is relative to you.
And it will change over time as you improve.
What was once a 30-minute brisk walk becomes a consistent jog for 1 hour.
Now that we discussed intensity, dose, and frequency – it’s time to go put this to use.
Lower your Blood Sugar & A1C : Action Step
Get a baseline reading of your A1C and then perform the exact strategy I outlined in this article and video and you will improve your A1C over the next few months.
It takes a little while for the zone 2 training to affect your A1C so give it ideally 3 months before you recheck your levels.
We also need to talk about diet but that’s for another article.
For now, your first action step is to get out there and start doing zone 2 training.
If you need any help at all lowering your blood sugar or A1C levels, feel free to send me an email and I promise I will get back to you.
I’m really passionate about helping middle-aged people reclaim their health and I want to make sure that you are getting your needs met.
Also, a big shout out to the research that Indigo San Milan has done on zone 2 training and mitochondrial function.
He has really done so much to bring this information to the forefront of the health space.
Cheers and we’ll see you next time.