About Exercise Glucose Spikes
Exercise can sometimes cause glucose to rise temporarily, even though activity is generally beneficial.
Glucose spikes during exercise: should you be concerned?
If you’re tracking your glucose with a Stelo biosensor or a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), you might be concerned if you see your glucose rise during high-intensity exercise. You shouldn’t be.
Despite the short-term rise in glucose, high-intensity training can improve both fasting glucose and insulin sensitivity over time. These adaptations support better metabolic flexibility and overall glucose control.
During intense exertion, stress hormones signal the liver to release stored glycogen into the bloodstream and to produce additional glucose to fuel the “fight or flight” response. Because of this, it’s not unusual to see your blood glucose rise during a high-intensity workout.
This rise can indicate that you’re mobilizing stored glycogen. In other words, the workout is intense enough that your body can’t rely primarily on fat and needs to use glucose as fuel.
This is a completely different physiological response than eating a cookie that spikes your glucose and contributes to insulin resistance. Exercise-related spikes are associated with improved long-term insulin sensitivity, which is a good thing.
To learn more about exercise and metabolic fitness, read our blog post here.
Removing exercise spikes from your Levels score
When you log an activity as Strenuous, that log and any other logs created within 2 hours won’t impact your Stability Score.
If you don’t want exercise spikes to affect your Levels scores, follow the steps below.
Log an activity as strenuous in the Levels app
- Open the Levels app
- Tap the green + button to add a log, then select Exercise
- Enter your exercise details, select Strenuous, then tap Save
Edit an existing exercise log in the Levels app
- On your Today page, scroll down to your Timeline
- Tap the activity you want to edit
- Tap the three-dot menu, then select Edit log
- Tap the Strenuous? checkbox
- Tap Save
Logging the activity as Strenuous should prevent your workout from negatively impacting your day’s score.
Your activity will automatically be marked as Strenuous in the Levels app if it’s imported from Apple Health or Health Connect and your heart rate goes above 150 BPM. This corresponds to 85% of a presumed max heart rate of 177.
If you have an unusually low max heart rate and your strenuous activity isn’t being captured, you can adjust the max heart rate threshold.
Adjust your max heart rate threshold
- Open the Levels app
- Select the More tab in the bottom-right, then tap Settings
- Scroll down to Max heart rate, then tap Update
- Adjust your threshold, then tap Save
Need help? Contact support at support@levels.com.