You, or someone you know might be on medications. It might be for cholesterol, blood pressure and/or blood sugar. However, each one of these medications changes the body in powerful ways. And along with that goes your response to exercise.
Unfortunately, guidance on how medications affect exercise is very vague, like “just listen to your body.”
But the truth is that each class of medications has its own mechanism of action, and there are specific ways in which they affect your exercise. We’ll break it down here.
And if you want help in exercising the right way, despite taking certain medications, you can see if you qualify to work with us by filling out this questionnaire.
Original source: here.
Cholesterol Medications (Statins, specifically)
The are different types of cholesterol medications, but the most common class is statins. The generic names would be “atorvastatin”, “rosuvastatin”, and others. Brand names would be drugs like “Lipitor” and “Crestor.”
It’s fairly well-known that statins deplete the body of a vitamin-like substance, called “CoEnzyme Q10.” This is used by the muscles to make energy. As a result, recovery from strength training can be slower, and in some cases, can lead to something called “rhabdomyolysis.” It it sounds long and scary, that’s because it is. It means “muscle death.” Not good.
So how do you adjust your exercise to cholesterol medications? In a couple of different ways:
- Gradual progress. As you know from other articles that I’ve written, exercise for the most part should be progressive. Over time, you should be getting stronger, and fitter. But the time that it takes should be longer for someone on statins.
- Longer recovery. Take longer breaks between intensive workouts than you think you need. Maybe just by a single day, but it may be the better thing to do (unless, of course, your doctor has said that if you change your diet and exercise, there’s the potential of you getting off your statins. That, obviously would be the best thing). So in between days of intensive workouts, you might do lighter workouts.
Beta Blockers
These are medications given for people with high blood pressure. What they do is lower blood pressure, and frequently, heart rate.
Some examples of beta blockers would be atenolol, bisoprolol, propranolol and metoporolol, although there are others.
So often, someone on beta blockers will be working extremely hard to try to get their heart rate into the “target range”, without any success. They may be close to a full-out sprint, and the heart rate is low as if it’s a moderate jog. Why? Because on beta blockers, it’s near-impossible to elevate the heart rate above a certain limit.
So in someone taking beta blockers, rather than gauging intensity by heart rate, it’s better to gauge intensity by perceived exertion. Simply rate your subjective perception of difficulty on a 0-10 scale.
ACE Inhibitors
This is another group of medications given for people with high blood pressure. They also lower blood pressure and heart rate, but by a different mechanism than the beta blockers.
Some examples of ACE inhibitors would be lisinopril, fosinopril, quinapril, and there are others.
In a person with high blood pressure but who is not on medications, blood pressure after exercise will frequently be lower than blood pressure before exercise. That’s called “post-exercise hypotension.” Great effect for someone not on medications. So blood pressure comes down after exercise anyway, but it may come down too much if a person is on ACE inhibitors. This can lead to dizziness, and in some cases, fainting.
The solution to this is simple. Just do a longer cool down than the average person. If the average person either does no cool down, or a 5-minute cool down, your cool down will need to be 5-10 minutes.
If you’re tracking your heart rate during the cool down, you want to see a relatively quick drop in the first minute after exercise, followed by a more gradual return to normal. So for instance, if during exercise, your heart rate is 130 beats per minute, within a minute, it might fall to 110-115. That’s quite normal. But during the second minute, it might fall only another 7-12 beats, the third minute, 4-8 beats, and so on. Until, at the end of your cool-down, you might be 10-20% above your resting heart rate.
Blood Sugar Medications
There are different blood sugar medications, and they work in different ways. Whether they increase the pancreas’s output of insulin, or they improve the cells’ sensitivity to insulin, or they decrease the absorption of carbohydrates, the end result is more or less the same: lower blood sugar.
For a non-diabetic who starts to exercise, within a few seconds of warming up, adrenaline is released. And then, cortisol is released. Both of those (and others) raise blood sugar. However, to counteract this rise in blood sugar, the pancreas also releases a bit of insulin. Insulin lowers blood sugar. So the net effect for a healthy, non-diabetic person who is exercising is stable blood sugar. It doesn’t go up or down.
For a diabetic, on blood sugar-lowering medications, this works differently. The drug may bring down blood sugar too low, and you may end up with a hypoglycemic episode. Symptoms would be things like shaking, confusion, blurry vision, and yes, fainting.
If you want to read in more detail how exercise affects blood sugar levels, you can read a much more detailed article that I wrote on the topic here.
So how should a diabetic on these medications exercise? Not all that differently, but this person will need more careful monitoring of their blood sugar. S/he should measure blood sugar levels immediately before exercise, in the middle of the workout, and again, at the end of the workout.
This is just for the first 3-4 workouts, just to understand how they specifically react to exercise. How much of a drop in blood sugar can this specific person experience? After they know their own unique responses, they might only need to measure blood sugar before exercise.
So now you know how medications affect exercise, and how you should adjust your training accordingly.
And if you’re on these medications and/or others, and want an exercise program tailored to you that takes them into account, you can feel free to fill out this form to see if you qualify to work with us.
