 hello everyone today I'm answering an important question that I get all the time is that why is my blood sugar going up or why does the blood sugar spike during exercise so that's a common question especially among athletic patients or patients who are trying their best and trying to get their heart rate up trying to do some intense or increasing their intensity of exercise and they end up finding themselves with high blood sugar that that has been a moral common of a problem because people started noticing that when they started using their CGMs and like Libre or Dexcom and that became a common question so I'm Dr. Ahmed Ergin I'm an endocrinologist practicing in Florida today we are going over the reasons for blood sugar spike when you exercise let's get started so basically today we are talking about why sugars are running high when you're exercising well a couple things you need to know some other hormones other than insulin that deals with the blood sugar levels now what are these other hormones we have cortisol right we have adrenaline these are the two major stress hormones that do not get along with your insulin not that they're not getting along they're made for a reason the cortisol's job is to provide glucose to your body in the time of stress because you may not find food it may not be readily available to you your body doesn't really know that you're in Himalayas and climbing at a mountain versus you are at the gym in a comfortable AC condition you know that you're just trying to run something you know something some exercise so your body is trying to get that cortisol running to you to make sure that you do not run out of sugar now when your insulin resistant the cortisol's effect is doubled or tripled and then your poor insulin trying to catch up with it is probably not going to be able to do a good job just because there's a lot of cortisol in your system your muscles are eating up trying to eat up a lot sugar and your body is trying to you know create stress response if your body is creating more sugar than the your muscles are picking up you are going to end up with a flood of glucose coming from your liver primarily due to gluconeogenesis due to this cortisol same thing happens with adrenaline again adrenaline is the fight or flight response with your with your exercise again your body doesn't know if you're running away from a lion or you're just running for fun so in any case you're creating a lot of adrenaline now the problem is the adrenaline and the cortisol when they get together they become a badass team they can really spike your blood sugar so as a result when you are at the gym or doing something outside and you're under stress under Sun or something sometimes those triggers anything that's stressful you are gonna see if you end up taking a finger stick or if you're just monitoring your blood sugar on your cgm you're gonna see that your blood sugar is climbing unless it was kind of on the very low side to begin with but it tends to climb especially with the high intensity exercise same thing with growth hormone growth hormone also kicks in which is good in the long run because growth hormone will help your body to burn fat in the long run but but in the short run you know during acute stress even growth hormone kicking in will create the blood sugar elevation so guys I hope that helps about the good thing is the good thing after all the stress is over your body learns to deal with stress right this short episodes of stress to your body is a good thing but the chronic stress is not a good thing right this short episode of stress teaches your body to prepare for the future so now your body is going to handle your blood sugars better after a few hours you will see that your blood sugars are going down now actually you have to be watching the low blood sugars especially if you are on certain medications like insulin or insulin producing agents you may have to watch out your blood sugars down the road and the effect of that exercise can last up to 24 hours so you have to be careful in terms of you know like a my blood sugar went up to 250 you know I will not worry about this is already high no you may find yourself being down to 50 in a few hours so guys I hope that helps and if it does please give a thumbs up share and like this video we'll see in the next one hey guys I hope you're enjoying this channel so far and I hope you subscribed already if you didn't do it and if you did watch this video right there I think that will help you too