Chapter 14
Mixing It Up with Cross-Training
IN THIS CHAPTER
Recognizing the benefits of cross-training
Seeing the specific advantages of mixing cardio with resistance
Deciding whether CrossFit training is for you
If you’re like a lot of other people, you may get bored doing the same physical activities day after day. More than 50 percent of people who start exercise training programs drop out in the first six months, so what you do to keep your workout fresh sometimes matters more for getting the most out of training and staying with it. Cross-training covers a lot of ground, including combining different types of activities (like cardio and resistance training) in one workout, doing both during the week, or including other types of training in your routine.
In this chapter, you discover the various advantages of cross-training, uncover the diabetes benefits of cross-training cardio and resistance, and examine the pros and cons of the cross-training approach called CrossFit.
Benefiting from Doing Cross-Training
You may want to do a variety of activities on a weekly basis, an approach known as cross-training. For example, you can walk on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday but swim on Tuesday and take dance classes on Saturday. Cross-training is good for you because it does the following:
- Uses several different activities to help you reach your exercise goals
- Adds variety by including activities like walking, cycling, rowing, swimming, arm bike, weight training, aerobic classes, tai chi, and yoga
- Helps fight insulin resistance
- Leads to lower doses of diabetes medications for many people
- Gives you flexibility in your program (for example, substituting indoor machines for outdoor walking if it’s raining outside)
- Reduces injuries because you don’t repeat the same movement all the time
- Minimizes boredom because you’re always changing up your exercises
- Uses different muscles during various activities so more muscles get the benefit of exercise training
- Makes your daily activities easier on your joints and body
- Keeps your body challenged to adapt and improve in different ways
- Allows you to rest some muscles so they can recover from workouts without stopping you from exercising altogether on other days
- Helps you develop new exercise skills and proficiencies
The following sections explore a few of these benefits in more detail and give you some suggestions for practicing cross-training.
What cross-training ensures above all else is the ability to continue being active and more motivated to move your body for the rest of your life.
Increasing blood glucose and glycogen use
In terms of managing insulin resistance (and blood glucose), this approach is also very effective. Usually, as your body becomes accustomed to doing an activity like walking or cycling, your blood sugar is less likely to drop while you are doing it. By participating in each activity less frequently, you tend to use more of your blood glucose and stored glycogen during each one — which is beneficial if you’re using workouts to help raise your insulin action or lower your blood glucose.
Experiencing fewer injuries
Nothing is worse than getting sidelined from your regular training due to overuse or acute injuries caused by being active. (Refer to Chapter 9 for more on these types of injuries.) Constantly stressing your body in the same way can lead to tendinitis in joints, bursitis, tendon ruptures, muscle tears and pulls, and possibly acute injuries. Each activity you do stresses your muscles and joints differently, so doing a variety lowers your chances of getting an injury.
Stick with moderation in all your exercise activities for the best results. For example, although the training approach called CrossFit can be an effective way to cross-train, it has been notorious for resulting in muscle and joint injuries for its participants because it relies on overtraining as a means of getting stronger and more fit. I discuss CrossFit in more detail later in the chapter.
Cross-training helps you deal with any activity-related injuries without losing all your conditioning while waiting for the injury to heal. If you have lower leg pain, you can still work out your upper body doing other activities and vice versa. Try to alternate weight-bearing activities like walking with non-weight-bearing ones (for example, swimming and stationary cycling) to avoid injuring another part of your body while waiting for an existing injury to get better.
Always wear proper footwear, and you will be less likely to get injured. If you choose to wear worn out or poorly fitted shoes, you may make existing issues such as flat feet, high arches, wide feet, or joint problems worse. Shoes with more stability like cross-training athletic ones provide more arch support and reduce risk of injuries. Custom orthotics may also be beneficial for some people. Talk with your health care provider or a foot doctor to find out what may be the proper styles of shoes for your unique feet. In addition, many sporting goods or running specialty stores can help match you with the right athletic shoes.
Enjoying more variety
Cross-training adds variety to your exercise program when you include activities like walking, cycling, rowing, swimming, arm cycling, weight training, aerobic classes, yoga, and more. You have more flexibility to choose different options based on your time constraints, the weather, and other factors. Mixing up your activities also allows you to work a variety of muscles. Each activity recruits either different muscles altogether or the same ones in different patterns; regardless, you experience a wider use of the muscles in your whole body.
Because you do each activity less frequently when you vary them, you won’t experience as pronounced a training effect specific to each one.
Staving off boredom
For some people, exercise is a four-letter word; they’d rather excise it from their vocabularies and their lives. Even calling it “physical activity” instead isn’t enough to keep them from getting bored with doing it.
However, people do find that when they engage in a variety of activities — some of them more enjoyable to them than others — they’re more willing to put up with the ones they don’t like just to be able to do the others on alternate days. So, in addition to making your workout routines more enjoyable, cross-training can help you fend off the boredom that’s more likely to pop up when you really don’t like doing activities you feel forced to do.
Taking the right approach to any type of cross-training
Engage in cross-training activities by following these tips:
- Choose a variety of activities that you enjoy, and include them all in your exercise program instead of just having a single activity.
- Improve your ability in a favorite activity by adding in others that use similar areas of the body. For example, if you like to walk, doing some cycling can make you stronger when you walk, so do some of both.
- Substitute these other activities every second or third day you exercise, or do different activities with every session. For example, walk half the time and cycle or do resistance exercise the other half.
- Substitute as many different exercise activities as you want to during a workout if you enjoy that approach more and it keeps you more engaged.
- Keep changing your exercise activities — daily, weekly, monthly, or seasonally — to stay challenged and motivated.
Table 14-1 provides a sample plan for cross-training that includes all the activities recommended for people with diabetes (especially if you’re 40 or older and need to do some balance training).
TABLE 14-1 Example of Weekly Cross-Training Exercise Plan
Day |
Aerobic (include intervals and vary aerobic activities) |
Resistance (exercises done can vary by day) |
Flexibility (do when warmed up) |
Balance (do any time of day) |
1 |
15 minutes |
30 to 45 minutes |
5 minutes |
5 minutes |
2 |
30 to 60 minutes |
5 minutes |
||
3 |
15 minutes |
30 to 45 minutes |
5 minutes |
5 minutes |
4 |
Daily activities |
Yoga class |
||
5 |
15 minutes |
30 to 45 minutes |
5 minutes |
5 minutes |
6 |
20 to 30 minutes |
5 minutes |
Tai chi class |
|
7 |
60 minutes (long day) |
5 minutes |
5 minutes |
Combining Cardio and Resistance Work to Combat Diabetes
The latest recommendations from the American Diabetes Association are that doing cross-training may give the greatest benefits for blood glucose and insulin sensitivity. Cardio and resistance training are likely the most common type of cross-training.
So, for example, in addition to walking, you may want to do some resistance training at least two nonconsecutive days per week (but preferably three). It can further improve your sensitivity to insulin and help you better manage your blood glucose; for older women with type 2 diabetes, the combination of aerobic and resistance training may also afford a more significant decrease in abdominal fat than aerobic training alone does, with increased muscle mass to boot. (Head to Chapter 10 for more info on cardio training and Chapter 11 for details on resistance.)
CrossFit Training with Diabetes
A concerned young man with type 1 diabetes asked whether it was safe for him to do CrossFit training, which is a strength and conditioning program consisting mainly of a mix of aerobic exercise, gymnastics (body weight exercises), and Olympic weight lifting. Its programming is decentralized, but its general methodology is used by thousands of private affiliated gyms, whose actual programs vary tremendously from site to site. The young man was already doing CrossFit training and wanted to continue, but a blog he’d read claimed that because intense training causes the liver to release excess glucose during training, people with type 1 diabetes may fare better with less-intense, lower-volume activities such as power lifting.
However, there’s no reason why a young and healthy person with diabetes shouldn’t be able to engage in CrossFit training without worrying excessively about the temporary rise in blood glucose levels that it may cause. To limit the rise in blood glucose, simply approach CrossFit training like any other intense workout, which can cause elevations in blood glucose even in people without diabetes. Insulin users just need to check their blood glucose frequently and adjust insulin doses and food intake to have adequate amounts in their bodies during and following workouts. (Flip to Chapters 3 and 7 for details on adapting insulin dosing and food consumption, respectively, for exercise.)
Doing some easy cardio exercise after an intense workout such as CrossFit can help lower blood glucose naturally in everyone. Also, exercisers experience a bigger blood glucose rise in the early morning compared to later in the day due to having more glucose-raising hormones and less insulin on board in the morning, pre-breakfast. If you opt for CrossFit, schedule it for the afternoon or evening to help minimize any blood glucose spike if that’s a big issue for you. If you do CrossFit in the morning, you may need to take some insulin (if you use it) to cover the rise in your blood glucose.
CrossFit isn’t without hazards, though. Make sure you are using correct form to prevent injuries, as you should do with any sport. One concern is that CrossFit’s online community enables athletes to follow the program without proper guidance, increasing the risk of improper form or technique that leads to injury. Some people have caused significant damage to the cartilage in their knees doing such training inappropriately. Undertaken correctly, CrossFit isn’t inherently bad or ineffective, but beginning exercisers starting out shouldn’t do too much. Besides, you can gain strength similarly from resistance exercise programs done correctly that don’t cause undue muscle soreness, so getting really sore isn’t necessary and can be harmful.
For example, a young woman who was a physical therapist and a regular CrossFit participant woke the morning after a particularly grueling session consisting of hundreds of reps of arm exercises and found she couldn’t bend her elbows. She was shortly thereafter diagnosed in the ER with rhabdomyolysis (rhabdo for short), a condition in which damaged skeletal muscle tissue breaks down rapidly. Many other reports of rhabdo related to CrossFit have surfaced. Strenuous exercise is a known — albeit rare — cause of rhabdo, which can cause kidney failure when breakdown products (myoglobin) of damaged muscles end up in the blood.
Severe symptoms like muscle pain, vomiting, and confusion are signs of significant muscle damage and possible kidney failure. Seek treatment right away if you have severe muscle pain and dark-colored urine.