LOS ANGELES — Women might consider aiming for those Kelly Ripa sculpted muscles.
It’s not just jogging that will keep Type 2 diabetes at bay, scientists said in a study released last week.
The benefits of aerobic exercise such as running and swimming to help prevent Type 2 diabetes have been established, but with a study of thousands of middle-aged and older women, researchers say that weightlifting and other muscle-strengthening exercise including yoga were associated with lower levels of the disease.
That doesn’t mean you should hang up your running shoes or swimsuit.
“The findings from our study also suggest that incorporating muscle-strengthening and conditioning activities with aerobic activity according to the current recommendation for physical activity (from health authorities for 150 minutes a week) provides substantial benefit for Type 2 diabetes prevention in women,” the authors wrote Tuesday in the online journal PLOS Medicine.
Women who did at least 150 minutes of aerobic activity a week and at least an hour a week of muscle-strengthening exercise were a third as likely to develop diabetes as inactive women, said the researchers, who were from several institutions including the Harvard School of Public Health.