High Intensity Exercise Benefits the Liver

We don’t see enough high-intensity studies that involve mice, but a new study that put them through exercise showed that one of the biggest benefits of HIIT involves our livers.

We have seen studies showing HIIT increases our insulin sensitivity. What is that? We’ll quote an earlier post:

Insulin resistance is a very serious problem. When your body stops reacting well to insulin, your pancreas makes more and this, down the road, is what leads to Type 2 Diabetes. It is commonly linked with obesity. But a high-intensity workout will actually increase your body’s sensitivity to insulin significantly, and will do it incredibly fast; as little as 2 weeks in some studies.

Now, while this is great, there have been questions about how this actually happens. Because if you can’t connect a trigger to it, there just may be another reason why it happens. But a new study, with mice, leads researchers to believe that the HIIT impacts the liver and our body fat, increasing our insulin sensitivity. And the study shows that the weight of the exerciser is not a factor.

This is also important for those suffering from Type 2 Diabetes, because it shows that even if they’re not receiving immediate weight loss benefits they are already able to push their insulin sensitivity back in the right direction.

So it looks like scientists are finding more benefits to doing HIIT. Now the question remains: do you care? Or do you do HIITs just to try to get six pack abs?