This study looked at how people who are largely sedentary or at least sitting,
can increase the utilization, the clearance of glucose from
the bloodstream after eating. You know that there are going to be people out there who,
for instance, might be injured, or you're traveling and you're stuck on a plane,
or you're in the classroom and you're forced to study all day or take notes all day.
You're just not getting enough opportunity to get those steps that you want to take. This seems
like a terrific, very low investment way to do it. Certainly zero cost.
A reminder that this video is for educational purposes only
and is not intended to be a replacement for seeking care from a healthcare professional.
Please do not make any changes to your medications or supplements
without consulting your healthcare provider.
Every time you eat your pancreas releases insulin, and as your body breaks down the
food that you eat and sugar is released, this sugar and insulin travel throughout
your bloodstream. Now as the blood sugar and insulin circulate throughout the body
and get into interstitial fluid, they eventually reach your cells.
It is at the site of the cell that insulin is able to activate a receptor on the cell that
essentially opens a channel by which sugar can cross the cell membrane and enter that specific
cell. Once inside the cell, the cell is able to use that sugar for its different metabolic
processes and all the different activities that are essential to the cell itself.
When everything is working properly so in a non-diabetic or non pre-diabetic,
this system works quite well. You eat, your sugar goes up,
and then the sugar is able to enter the cells and the sugar goes back down. The problem arises
when the pancreas is no longer able to keep up with the amount of sugar being ingested
and or the amount of sugar that is being dumped into the bloodstream by the liver.
Yes. The liver also has its own storage of sugar in the body,
and it dumps that into the bloodstream for when there is a situation when it is needed. However,
in type two diabetes, this system is broken and the liver ends up
dumping sugar into the bloodstream when really there is no need for sugar at all.
What we are talking about here is a problem known as insulin resistance. So if the offer,
in this case, the offer of sugar is constantly there, these receptors essentially down-regulate
and the cell stops to uptake all of this sugar into the cell because the cell does not need all
of this sugar. So essentially what happens is if the cell does not want the sugar, then that
sugar is going to remain in the bloodstream and cause something called hyperglycemia.
It's also going to increase the amount of time that it takes the body to get back to
normal blood glucose levels, and if you have sustained hyperglycemia over a period of time,
you'll also have a high hemoglobin a1c, which is your average blood glucose over a period
of about three months, and this can lead to a cascade of problems and an eventual diagnosis
of type two diabetes, which comes with other cardiovascular and systemic risk factors.
Essentially, it's normal for a blood sugar to go up after eating, however,
it's not normal for that blood sugar to remain plateaued or remain circulating after eating.
It should go down to normal levels after eating. It's also not normal for your blood sugar to be
high when you wake up, and so if you're waking up in the morning and your blood sugar is high,
this probably means that your liver is dumping sugar into the body when it's not needed.
So when we have dysregulation of the body's blood sugar levels, it has wide
ranging effects on the body, and if this is not able to be controlled by diet and exercise,
usually a physician will intervene with medications like Metformin, SGLT2 inhibitors,
and even sometimes insulin injections. So the title of this study is a potent physiological
method to magnify and sustain soleus oxidative metabolism, improve glucose and lipid regulat.
This is a simple way to increase your metabolism from the comfort
of your own home. Here is the science behind it with Dr. Andrew Huberman.
First of all, you have a muscle called the Soleus. The Soleus muscle is a more
or less wide flat muscle that sits beneath what most people think of as their calf,
although it's part of the calf muscle.
The other portion of the calf is called the gastrocnemius . The soleus sits below that. Now,
the Soleus muscle is a unique muscle because it's largely slow twitch muscle fibers. It's designed
to be used continuously over and over again for stabilizing your body when you're standing
upright, for walking. This is a muscle that's designed to contract over and over and over again.
In fact, you could walk all day on this muscle and most likely it would not get sore. In contrast,
a muscle like your bicep or your tricep. If I were to have you perform hundreds or thousands
of repetitions, even with a very light weight, you know, one pound weight or a two pound weight,
eventually it would fatigue, you would feel it sort of a burn there. It's a very unusual set
of muscles to use repeatedly, but the Soleus is an unusual muscle in that it really is designed
to be used continuously. Now, this study was focused on how people who sit a lot of
the day and don't have the opportunity for a lot of physical movement or maybe
who don't even exercise at all, can improve their metabolism and glucose utilization.
First of all, they used an equal number of male and female. Subjects. There were a wide range of
body mass indices. Okay? So this wasn't just super fit people or people that were purely sedentary
and not fit. They used a wide variety of ages. People who tended to walk a lot or not walk a lot,
they measured changes in metabolism and blood glucose utilization in people that had done these
soleus pushups while seated in the laboratory. And I must say they had them do these soleus pushups
for quite a long while, continuously. So they had them do it for as long as 270 minutes total
throughout the day. So if you divide that, that's four and a half hours,
you might say, well, four and a half hours of lifting the heel and putting the heel down,
lifting the heel, putting the heel down, that's a lot.
But they didn't always do it continuously. They had some breaks in there. So this is
the sort of thing that you could imagine you or other people could do while seated,
while doing zooms or while on calls. Maybe even while eating. The point is that people who did
these Soleus pushups experienced dramatic improvements in blood sugar regulation and
in metabolism, despite the fact that the soleus is just 1% of the total musculature.
What they saw was a large magnitude, for example, 52% less postprandial glucose excursion, so 52%
less increase in blood glucose and 60% six zero less hyperinsulinemias. They also miraculously
observed that despite this being again, a small muscle, 1% of the total muscle mass,
so very small oxidative use, they saw big improvements in systemic metabolic regulation.
More about this study includes the fact that the benefits they observed were very long lasting,
as long as two hours after a meal, they could still see this improved blood glucose utilization.
What this means is that if you're somebody who cares about blood glucose regulation. You want
to keep your metabolism running. Please don't stop exercising the other ways that
you exercise. But if you're somebody who wants to maximize your health, doing these soleus pushups
fairly continuously while seated is going to be beneficial. The point being that if you're
somebody who cares about their fitness, this study is interesting because what it means is that,
again, if you are forced to be I mobile or sitting longer than you would like,
if you're stuck in a meeting or zooms or class or on a plane, et cetera, or if you're simply trying
to add a bit more fitness and metabolic health to your overall regimen Soleus pushups, at least
to me, seem like a very low investment, simple zero cost tool to improve your metabolic health