Doing one minute of exercise before a meal can help blunt blood glucose and insulin spikes especially if it is a carbohydrate heavy meal. You can even increase your exercise time up to five minutes to increase the effect. However even doing one minute will provide some benefit. This study has shown that doing “exercise snacking” over the day was much more effective than doing that exercise in one block. Some things to note from the study:
- the exercise snacking was done in 3 blocks before each meal of 6 x 1min of intense exercise.
- the study was only performed on 9 participants (7 males and 2 females)
- the study was only performed over 3 days
So the sample size is small but the results are quite promising and you can extract some hypotheses and potential applications. Even though the “exercise snack” was six minutes per meal, even one minute should provide some benefit to the majority of people.
The benefits can likely be attributed to muscle contraction causing GLUT4 receptors to translocate to the surface of the muscle. The job of these GLUT4 receptors is pull glucose from the blood into the muscle so it can use them as energy. So increasing the number of these receptors on the surface of your muscle will increase the amount of glucose they transport from the blood stream. Therefore decreasing blood glucose spikes and in turn insulin spikes reacting to the glucose. This is also great for reducing the amount of energy that gets stored as adipose tissue (fat).
Muscle stretching has also been shown to increase the translocation of these GLUT4 receptors to the surface in rodent muscle so it is likely these effects carry over to humans. So if you are not able to do some quick exercise maybe you can try substitute with some quick stretching.
Example exercises or stretches
Ideally it would be best to do exercises or stretches that require the most muscle mass activation. Exercises that target legs or a large number of upper body muscles would prepare a lot of muscle mass to absorb glucose. Here are some examples:
- 20 body weight squats
- 25 wall push ups
- sprint up 2 flights of stairs
- sit in a third world squat
- stretch the thighs and hamstrings
If you are out at a restaurant for a meal but still want to do one minute of exercise and need some privacy. Excuse yourself and go to the bathroom to do some squats or pushups.
Reducing glucose and insulin spikes has shown to be one of the most important factors in longevity so this quick tip will hopefully help you live longer and healthier. It will also help with reducing your total adipose tissue making you look and feel great!