We live in this world where we want instant gratification and that even applies to when it’s time to reduce our blood sugar, bringing our blood glucose down. So, what’s the fastest way, you can bring your blood glucose down, but also have a long-term effect in terms of glucose modulation. Let’S go ahead and dive into this because it gets a little bit sciency, but once you know it makes a lot of sense and you can implement it any time. So what we have to understand here is that we have what are called glucose transporters and glucose transporters are just like.
The name sounds okay. They are transporters that transport glucose out of the bloodstream and bring it into a cell okay. Well, we have a very important glucose transporter.
That’S called glute4 now without getting super over the top sciencey glut4 is a glucose transporter that normally listens to insulin. So normally what happens is insulin, spikes as a result of eating carbohydrates and, of course, insulin brings your glucose down because it’s the job of insulin to let glucose out of the bloodstream and into a cell. So that makes sense.
Insulin brings glucose down pretty fast, but that’s not the answer with the video we’re talking about see what insulin does is it hits a cell triggers an insulin receptor and that insulin receptor then goes into the center of a cell and it wakes up. I wake up. Wake up wake up and it wakes up this thing called glute4 and then that glute for all groggy and stuff wakes up and goes to the surface of a cell, and then it grabs the glucose. It’S not the insulin that actually lets the glucose into the cell.
It’S the insulin that wakes up the glut4 and the glute4 lets the insulin into the cell. Well, you know, what’s interesting is when we are exercising when we are moving. Our cells are taking glucose up in a way that is completely independent of insulin.
Simply the act of moving our muscles facilitates what is called insulin: independent glucose uptake okay. Now, if you were to be monitoring your glucose, you could actually see that simply by working out, two things could happen: okay, if you’re, untrained and you’re not really used to it. Sometimes working out can actually spike your glucose, but why is it potentially doing this? Well, a spike in glucose can occur during activity or during a workout, because your body is trying to release glucose from glycogen stores to provide fuel okay. But if it’s a lower intensity movement or even lower intensity resistance training, sometimes you see a drop in glucose, and this is because, once again, the simple contraction of muscles okay and the contraction that causes a change in sort of how calcium is used in a skeletal Muscle contraction triggers that same glute for transporter to collect glucose without insulin even being present.
Okay, now another thing interesting happens. Okay, when you are working out, you have a super saturation of blood. That’S going into the tissues! Okay, you have the irrigation, it’s called irrigation, so you increase the irrigation into the muscles into the sarcoplasm right.
Well, what also happens with that is even when you’re, not eating carbohydrates, you still sometimes have little bits of insulin floating around through your bloodstream. Okay, sometimes it’s a moderate amount. Sometimes it’s a low amount. Sometimes it’s next to zero, but you still have a little bit floating around well, what happens is once the blood flow starts to get into the nooks and crannies of your muscles.
Those little remnants of insulin that are floating around now get to go weave their way into the snooks and crannies of the muscles and that insulin little bits of insulin allow that glut4 to translocate and collect glucose. So now you have a double whammy. You have the exercise and the contraction itself sucking up glucose, which of course, can bring your glucose down, but you also have the insulin action acting upon different cells and moving in a supersaturated way.
You can monitor this like if you were to go and say, eat some chocolate cake and then work out. You could watch how your glucose could be attenuated. You could watch how that glucose spike from the food that you ate would actually be attenuated, probably pretty darn, quick upon movement.
Okay, it’s pretty darn interesting and even if you were at a fasted state and you went to exercise, you might see a little dip. You might even see a little increase. Okay, i put a link if you’ve never heard of using a continuous glucose monitor before it seriously is a game changer.
I’M so glad that we’re reaching a point now where these are becoming more accessible. Okay, there’s a company called cygnus and there’s a link down below i’m actually on the advisory board. For them they are a company that provides a continuous glucose monitor through dexcom, where you get to have like a telehealth sort of physician. Consult you get to obtain a continuous glucose monitor, which in and of itself, is pretty darn awesome, and that way you get a real-time readout of how you respond to a food, but in this particular case, even cooler how you respond after you eat the food okay.
So the continuous glucose monitor is cool, but cygnosis technology is what makes it really cool. They have its algorithm based, so they have an app and this app takes in what it is reading from your continuous glucose monitor and it algorithmically provides coaching and context. So let’s say i ate that chocolate cake, it would actually ping me and say: hey your blood. Sugar is rising really fast.
You need to do something about it and it gives me recommendations like do some squats or go for a walk, all the kinds of things that i’m talking about things that you can bring your blood sugar down, pretty quick. So i like to play around with it all the time. The reason that i mention it is it’s just like a visual scale of what we’re talking about. As you get really really good at understanding your body.
Sometimes you can see what that feels like, but being able to monitor it helps you relate the feeling with a visual scale, so you can be like. Ah, that feeling i felt like my blood sugar was high and it confirmed it all without having to like prick your finger a bunch of times. But again the cool part is the coaching and the data that comes with it, so that you can really have like a personalized approach.
Reading your continuously monitored blood glucose so that link down below will save you 25 off of signals, so check them out 25 off discount link. So you can get your hands on a continuous glucose, monitor and get the data and the coaching that comes with it. So long term, like i explained in the title of this video like okay, short term, we bring our glucose down fast.
But how does this affect us long term? Well, it has to do with glute4 expression, which means that we are actually expressing more glucose transporters. Remember we aren’t born with a finite amount of glucose transporters. Okay, our body creates them, but in order to create them, we need a signal.
Okay, if your body’s, not good at utilizing glucose, why would it create more glut4? It just doesn’t have a reason to right. Eventually, if you don’t use it, you lose it, but exercise and movement, specifically resistance training in a consistent fashion, consistently continuing that movement can actually allow your body to create more glute for transporters which might make you more responsive to that chocolate cake. It might make you more responsive to the carbohydrates you consume, so they go to the right place and don’t just sit in your bloodstream piling up causing potential issues. Okay.
Now, if you look at the data, it’s very intriguing, there was a study published in the journal of applied physiology that took a look at low intensity exercise and high intensity exercise. Okay, 40 vo2 peak versus 80 vo2 peak, and they found that both groups had very similar outcomes when it came down to glut4 expression. The reason that i say this is that the mere act of moving consistently at even a low intensity is tremendous for allowing your body to be good at bringing glucose down fast when you consume carbs.
Okay, 40 intensity versus 80 vo2 peak. So it doesn’t matter if you’re going and you’re killing it in a crossfit, wad or you’re going for a walk a lot of times. It’S a very similar outcome and it just underscores the importance of consistency with your movement.
Even if it’s not super intense, I would much rather you go in and do literally a lackadaisical workout, four or five days a week then crush yourself one day a week and then sit on the couch the rest of the week, much better. As far as that’s concerned because think about it from a survival standpoint, the body is saying this person moves a lot. We need to make sure that we are constantly prepared to suck up glucose into the cell, because sucking up glucose into the cell isn’t just a damage control technique from the body. The body doesn’t care that you indulged in carbohydrates.
That’S not what it’s worried about! It doesn’t care that you ate a bunch of pixie sticks and trying to reduce the damage from that. All your body is concerned about is energy dynamics and trying to make sure that you have enough energy available to get into the cell, and if you are someone that moves consistently, even at a low intensity, your body is conditioned to say. Oh, when glucose comes in, we suck it up into the muscle, and that’s where that glut4 expression is so important. Now, there’s another study published in the journal diabetes that looked at a similar thing with leg extension like resistance training.
They had subjects, do leg extension for three weeks, not straight just every day for three weeks and then at the end of the three weeks. They did a muscle biopsy and they found that their glute 4 expression had increased 52 percent as well as ast-160, which is a protein that’s associated with ampk phosphorylation phenomenal stuff. What’S even cooler, it remained elevated for 15 hours at 15 hours. It was still 60 higher than those that didn’t work out, so you have an effect that actually remains for a while.
Glute4 expression is continuing for 15 hours after a workout, and then it does start to go down quite a bit. So you get an effect just by working out in during the day that can allow you to bring your glucose down pretty fast, just naturally, but the bottom line is that if you want to bring your glucose down fast, you need to get as much irrigation of Blood into as much tissue as possible, so that means don’t go into the gym and just do some bicep curls go into the gym and do some full body squats do something like thrusters, where you’re squatting and then moving your shoulders and your arms too. The more overall mass that you can move, the more that you are going to have this insulin independent, facilitated uptake of glucose into the cell, and i cannot overemphasize. This is going to be a very fast way to modulate glucose, regardless of insulin and as a fun tip if you’re doing low carb.
