If I have diabetes, how can I manage my blood sugar levels after exercise?

During the two- or three-hour window after strenuous exercise it’s crucial to know where your blood sugar is and do constant monitoring. It will be different today than it will be tomorrow. This is something all of our athletes with type 1 must do.

After exercise, the body is going through a lot of hormonal changes. Whatever glucose gets produced in the bloodstream to help with exercise, whatever you eat during exercise that your body doesn’t use during the event, combined with the body’s cortisol production can cause a big spike in blood sugar immediately following exercise for about an hour-and-a-half period. It’s common among all of our athletes to give a bolus immediately following exercise to prevent this post-exercise spike. (Bolus is the term we use to describe delivering insulin.)

At that point, it’s about tinkering with the right number to find out how much insulin you need. To dampen the spike, we will, the second we’re done with exercise, do a bolus of 4 units of insulin. If I want to eat, I would double the insulin I would normally do – but that’s just in that one hour period after exercise. Everyone is a little bit different. The one consistency we’ve seen is the spike immediately following exercise and the drop in blood sugar in the hour and a half post exercise.