Swimming and Water Aerobics: Fun Ways to Manage Your Glucose Levels
Key takeaways:
- Swimming is a great exercise for diabetes management as it can lower blood sugar levels, improve insulin resistance, and reduce the risk of diabetes-related complications like heart disease.
- Swimming is a low-impact physical activity, making it ideal for people with chronic pain, injuries, arthritis, or other joint problems.
- The numerous health benefits of regular swimming, water aerobics, and even just walking in water can give you more energy, strengthen muscles, and improve coordination.
Exercising in water can be a fun and effective way to stay active and manage your glucose levels. Different forms of water exercises can also make it easier to deal with stiff joints or other chronic pain while exercising.
Swimming and water aerobics can be an enjoyable exercise, from very gentle to an intense fat-burning and muscle-building workout that can push your heart and lungs into overdrive.
The buoyancy of water makes aquatic exercise low impact so it’s almost impossible to injure yourself. Regardless of your fitness level, swimming, walking in water, or water aerobics might be the perfect exercise for you, especially if you have arthritis, chronic pain, or other health issues. It's a great way to manage your diabetes, reduce stress, and have fun at the same time.
Swimming as exercise
For people with type 2 diabetes, exercising in water can be just as effective at improving blood sugar levels as land-based workouts.
Swimming has been shown to boost cardiovascular health by boosting your heart rate, which in turn helps to lower blood pressure, strengthens your heart muscle, and improves circulation. Swimming involves all the major muscles. During exercise, muscle cells absorb glucose more efficiently, removing it quickly from the bloodstream.
The buoyancy of water is easy on your joints, so that makes water aerobics a good choice if you have joint problems, chronic pain, or are recovering from injury. It's also popular among seniors and pregnant women.
Though almost any type of exercise in a pool is low impact, you can easily make the workout more challenging by doing more repetitions of each move, moving faster during the workout, or using special water-resistant weights, gloves, or other water aerobics tools.
Water exercise lowers glucose levels
Exercise, on land or in water, helps you to keep your blood glucose in the normal range for a greater percentage of time, independent of insulin. This decreases your risk for cardiovascular disease and other diabetes-related complications.
Regular exercise, including water-based activities, is also crucial for weight management as it helps reduce body fat and increase lean muscle. Lean muscle burns more calories and more blood sugar than fat does, even when you are sitting or at rest.
Walking in water
Even if you can’t swim, walking in waist-deep water or doing a water aerobics class are effective ways to better manage blood sugar levels.
In a review of studies examining aquatic exercises and blood glucose levels in people with type 2 diabetes, water exercisers reduced their A1C by the same amount as those doing land-based exercise. The water-based exercises included walking or running in a pool, water cycling, and various types of water-based fitness classes.
Being active in water is also a great way to reduce stress, and the activity can help you to sleep better, too.
Exercising in water is more gentle
Swimming, walking or running in deep water, and water aerobics all put virtually no stress on your feet and joints.
In fact, when you’re standing in waist-deep water, you only have to support 50% of your body weight. When you move to neck-deep water, 90% of your body weight is supported by the water.
Many people find that they can do exercises in water that they can’t do on land due to pain in their joints, lack of flexibility, or muscle weakness. This is important because running on land and other land-based exercises may cause foot injuries like blisters that can be slow to heal and prone to infection if you have diabetes.
These are just some of the benefits of water-based exercise. While no exercise is perfect, swimming or water aerobics is easy to adjust based on your needs, restrictions, and abilities.
You can make any water-based activity or exercise easier (or more strenuous) by adjusting the size and speed of your movements, adding or reducing weights, wearing aquatic gloves, or wearing a flotation device and running in deeper water. Water exercise while listening to music, or participating in a group class, can be a lot of fun and a way to meet new friends.
As with any new exercise program, unless you are already very fit, start with short swim sessions and gradually increase your time to 30-60 minute sessions as your endurance improves.
Don't be discouraged if you need to take a short rest every few minutes. These quick breaks won't reduce the effectiveness of swim; in fact, they will enable you to stay active in the water for longer periods overall.
Safety precautions
- Remember to always check your glucose before, during, and after you exercise.
- Take your medication as your doctor recommends.
- Always have snacks, juice, and a glucose meter and test strips available in a waterproof container.
- Don’t swim or exercise in a pool alone. Ideally, have an exercise buddy or do a water aerobics class with others who know how to help in case of a sudden drop in your blood sugar.
- If there is a lifeguard, let him or her know that you have diabetes.
- Wear a diabetes medical ID bracelet while you are in the water.
- To protect your feet, you may want to wear lightweight water shoes in the pool and shower sandals in the locker room, to lower the risk of bruising or cutting your feet and of getting athlete’s foot.
- Examine your feet after you leave the pool to check for cuts, bruises, or abrasions.
- Make sure that your continuous glucose monitor, insulin pump, and any other diabetes wearable is water (and chlorine) resistant. Check with the manufacturer to be sure. If you use an insulin pump, ask your doctor or healthcare provider if it’s safe for you to disconnect while swimming or doing water aerobics.
Read more about exercising with diabetes here: