Your Comprehensive guide to training with PCOS (Part 3)
Exercise and PCOS Independent of Weight Loss
While we discussed exercise a bit in the context of its ability to aid us in losing weight, exercise is also incredibly beneficial for women with PCOS in its ability to help us regulate our insulin resistance independent of any effect on our weight.
Let’s talk about strength training first. While muscle is not only responsible for much of our metabolism, muscle is our body’s biggest reserve for carbohydrates. The more muscle we have, the more storage capacity we have. Imagine you, like myself, buy too many packages from Amazon. If you only have a small apartment in Manhattan, it’s likely to overflow with stuff quite quickly. But if you move to Long Island and buy a larger house, all of a sudden you’ve got a lot more room to put your things. Adding muscle is like taking that apartment and adding more and more rooms; when you build more space you can more room to store the stuff you more from Amazon. Additionally, strength training of any kind improves the ability of our muscle cells to transport glucose away from our blood stream. Strength train well for a couple years is like adding a rooms to your house and installing one of the creepy Tesla robots to move all your packages to exactly where you want them to go. Weird analogy right? Cardiovascular training also improves your cell’s ability to transport glucose through similar mechanisms, although it will not build muscle. Nevertheless, cardio and weights should be a part of your exercise routine.
So how exactly should we exercise if we want to improve our insulin sensitivity? Strength train two to three times per week to build muscle and participate in cardiovascular training two to three times per week at a low to moderate intensity for 30 minutes to an hour per session, in whatever form you enjoy. You will notice these are the same general recommendations that I gave for weight loss. Unfortunately, these general recommendations are all I can call ‘evidence based,’ in that this is as far as the research can take us.
I do, however, have much more to say on the subject. With insulin sensitivity in mind, I would make gaining muscle a top priority. We want that big house in Long Island. And while I wrote a much longer guide to building muscle, I will summarize the most important points here. If your goal is to gain muscle, follow the following guidelines
Complete two to three full body workouts per week
Pick exercises that work multiple muscle groups at one time and try to add more weight and more reps to those exercises over time
Pick exercises that are stable, that allow you to lift heavy weights
Use a technique that allows you to place the most amount of strain on the muscle and as little as possible on your joints. This means controlling the lowering part of the lift, often including pauses in the hardest part of the motion
Use a full range of motion that you have available to you, with emphasis on the part of the motion where the muscle is most stretched
Train hard - do as many reps as you can on every set until you feel the muscle you are working start to fail
