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Researchers found that walking downhill helps diabetics improve sugar metabolization more than walking uphill.

September 7, 2004
VITAL SIGNS
Exercise: For Muscles, It's All Downhill
By JOHN O'NEIL

Exercise helps diabetics improve their ability to metabolize sugar. But for those patients who don't feel up to the Stairmaster, a new study offers some comfort: the exercise involved in walking downhill, the researchers found, leads to even bigger improvements than hiking up.

The study was presented last week at a conference of the European Society of Cardiology and was led by Dr. H. Drexel, a cardiologist at the Academic Hospital in Feldkirch, Austria.

The study tried to find out if there was a difference in the effects of the two main forms of muscle use, concentric and eccentric, on glucose tolerance.

In concentric exercise, muscle cells shorten to exert force on an object, as in lifting a weight. In eccentric exercise, muscle cells are lengthened as they resist a force - for example, opposing gravity by lowering a weight more slowly than it would fall.

The study involved 45 healthy but sedentary adults. Half of them were assigned to climb a route that included a rise in elevation of 600 meters (about 2,000 feet) three to five times a week, taking a cable car back down. The others took the cable car up and walked down the same hill. After two months, the groups switched, performing the opposite of their original trek for another two months.

Dr. Drexel said that both forms of exercise improved glucose tolerance, but that the downhill hike had a bigger effect - a 25 percent change in tolerance compared with 9 percent after the stint of uphill climbing.

He did not speculate on the reason for the difference. But other research has raised the possibility that eccentric exercise may increase blood flow more than concentric exercise does. -- From the New York Times

This, of course, assumes that they really all *did* walk uphill when they said they would... ;)