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What are some of the precautions to take with exercise if diabetic?

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Speaker: What are some of the precautions to take with exercise?

Kathy Reily: Some of the precautions with exercise would involve persons with diabetes that take certain medications that will lower their blood sugar. So if you are taking one of these particular medications or insulin, you would need to make sure that you are not having a hypoglycemic reaction during the exercise or after you finish. So if you do take a medication that causes hypoglycemia, you do want to check your blood sugar before your exercise and have your blood sugar meter available while you are exercising. Another caution with exercise is that you most likely want to have some form of medical identification on you so that if anybody needs to stop and help you, if you are having a low blood sugar they would see your medical ID, either on bracelet or necklace and would be able to tell somebody that you do have diabetes and that your sugar should be checked. If you do take one of the medications that causes low blood sugar, during exercise you would want to have available some form of sugar or carbohydrate in case you had a low blood sugar and examples of these would be some glucose tablets or juice just available to give you some quick carbohydrate to push your sugar up in case it went low.