Advice for Professionals

Defining type, duration and intensity of exercise.

Definition of exercise

Physical activity is defined as any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that results in energy expenditure. Physical activity in daily life can be categorized into occupational, sports, conditioning, household, or other activities. Exercise is a subset of physical activity that is planned, structured, and repetitive and has as a final or an intermediate objective the improvement or maintenance of physical fitness.

Exercise is performed for various reasons, to aid growth and improve strength, preventing aging, developing muscles and the cardiovascular system, honing athletic skills, weight loss or maintenance, improving health and also for enjoyment. For more details on the health benefits of exercise for people with Type 1 diabetes see section of this website.

Guidelines recommend that adults with Type 1 diabetes undertake at least 150 min per week of moderate to vigorous aerobic exercise, spread out over at least 3 days, with no more than two consecutive days between bouts of aerobic activity. In addition, muscle-strengthening activities that involve all major muscle groups should be performed on two or more days per week. For more information on recommended levels of activity for people with Type 1 diabetes see Physical activity levels of people with Type 1 diabetes section of this website

Being able to define what type of exercise what type of exercise a patient does is key to understanding what will happen to their blood glucose when they perform that exercise. This will also help you to work out how much energy the patient will burn during that exercise and any changes you may need to suggest to their insulin regimen and eating patterns when performing that exercise.

The Pyramid of fitness

In simple terms, to improve at any type of exercise you need to work on four areas (see figure 1).

How much someone needs to work on each of these will depend on what exercise they are doing.

Defining a patient’s exercise

Defining exactly what a patients does should form part of the initial assessment of a patient (see Initial medical assessment of patient with Type 1 diabetes in relation to exercise part of this website.

To give good tailored advice to a patient you will need to know determine three things:

1. What type of activity the patient is doing (click here to learn more about this)
2. How intense the activity is (click here to learn more about this)
3. How long the activity will last for (click here to learn more about this)

Once you have learned this you are ready to start to give advice on how your patient can manage glucose around exercise (see Encouraging patients to exercise and starting advice section of this website).