Thursday 3 July 2014

Personal training begins

A few months ago I wrote an entry on trying to loose weight and how when eating the right portions and exercising  alone was difficult and scary in the point that the unexpected lows and the management of insulin levels as your body needs less was and is difficult. You never want the low to hit in the middle of the night that is for sure.

As this is the case I decided that this time I will try a different tactic and use a personal trainer. It was also timely that I saw online that there was a personal trainer who was looking to make the next step and become a personal trainer that is qualified to train people with critical diseases or problems such as T1. To me I didn't even know this existed so I thought it should be interesting to see what they know and what they could do differently.

On MDI I lost 30 odd Kilograms at one point and in doing so I had some of the worst hypo's I have ever had. One day would be fine the next would be the body saying your now loosing weight so you don't need so much insulin. To which case I would adjust what I was having but where I would try and preempt it I would run high and just feel terrible. It was great to loose weight but it was a scary time.

Now on a pump with a CGM sensor it is very interesting to see the impact of what I am going to put myself through.

I get to the gym on my first session dreading what was to come and I get the information that we are going to want to work out to bun fat and not glucose. I had never really thought of this before, and probably it was just naive  of me, but to do this it meant we would work on the large mussel groups with heavy weights with high repetition. As I like to think that the people who are the specialists in their profession know what is best I did the work out.

The weight section of the work out consisted of dead lifts, squats, squat jumps and bench press. The cardio section, even though it was a very small fast bursts, was done on a rope pull machine. Like short sprints it was 2 minutes of fast paced repetition.

By the end of the sprints it was then onto the treadmill for a cool down walk to ensure my heart rate lowered. I can safely say that by this stage I felt like vomiting from the lactic acid flowing through my limbs and it felt like my legs were jelly.  It was a hell of a work out.

Now the interesting part. Usually when I do a cardio workout my BSL will rise and the 2 or so hours later it will drop dramatically. Through out my workout and because I was wearing my Medtronic CGM I was able to monitor what was happening and anytime through the hour. I was shocked to see that through out the hour my BSL remained roughly the same. I had no rise and even more importantly I had no major drop even hours after. I was amazed and I felt great.

I have continued to work out and wear my CGM and I have had consistent results. Heavy weights with high repetition saw stable BSL. There had been a number sessions since where we incorporated sprints on the bike along with the rope pull machine in the one session. As this was multiple cardio elements I did notice on my CGM hours after the workouts the drops in BSL occurred.

Moving forward there is a fine line between burning fat instead of glucose but if nothing else I have another element to use in the war with T1D and how I can just manage what I can to get the results I need.

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