Aging generally refers to the biological, physical, and mental declining of properties and functions; and along with the atrophy of physiological and physical functions, psychological change also occurs, which is the state when the self-sustained function and the social role function of an individual is weakened [1].

Aging brings many changes in the functional aspect of the human body. Among them, the representative ones are the decreases in muscular strength and function. When the decrease in the muscle function occurs due to the aging, strengths such as muscle endurance, agility, and flexibility are decreased [2]. These decreases in the strength can cause negative effect to the everyday life, such as when carrying things, climbing up the stairs, and standing up from a chair. This decrease in muscle function can cause difficulty in independent living; and moreover, it can induce chronic diseases reducing the life span [3]. Especially, the decrease in the muscle function reduces the glucose storage capability, resulting in diabetes [4].

Diabetes is caused by this effect, as well as by the hormones secreted from the pancreas, or by the defect of both; and it is a chronic metabolic disorder featuring hyperglycemia [5]. Chronic hyperglycemia is an important cause increasing the complications of the vascular diseases in the diabetic patient [6]. Hyperglycemia is reported that even without diabetes, when the complications such as cardiovascular disease occur, the patient with temporarily high blood glucose can have a bad prognosis [7]. Therefore, for the prevention and treatment of diabetes and complications, managing the blood glucose is important. The goal of the current diabetes treatment is to control the metabolic disorder and to prevent the occurrences of complications to disable the progress. For the therapeutic methods, there are dietary treatment, exercise therapy, and drug treatment [8]. Among these, the exercise therapy is useful in enhancing the physical strength and preventing complications, which are known to be effective in diabetes treatment [9]. Regular exercise reduces the glucose concentrations in the blood [10], increases the insulin sensitivity of the peripheral tissue including the muscles [11], and also helps to control the weight of obese diabetic patients [12]. Aerobic exercises are generally practiced by diabetic patients until now, but the elderly patients with diabetes have difficulty in performing exercises; this is because they have problems of diabetic complications or retrogression in functional capabilities due to obesity, degenerative arthritis, cardiovascular disease [13]. Therefore, for the patients with difficulty in performing aerobic exercises consisting of sustaining weight for the duration of workout, it is reported that resistance exercise can be a good alternative for these diabetic patients [14].

The resistance exercise increases the amount of muscle for the diabetic patients to improve glucose intolerance and insulin sensitivity. As a result, it brings improvement to glycometabolism and reduction in glycated hemoglobin [14,15]. Also, it is reported to increase the capillary ratio of the muscle fiber and improve the storage capacity of glycogen within the muscle [16]. Therefore, as a diabetic person ages, resistance exercise and muscular reinforcement exercise are required with the general exercise amount, because improving the muscular strength and endurance are helpful for the treatment of diabetes [17]. The traditional resistance exercise is recommended with 50-80% range of weight for 1RM of elders [18]. But, the power training has recently been known to be performed in relatively low intensity of 40% of weight for 1RM in fast speed concentric contraction, which not only increases muscle power and strength but is also effective on improving the functional performance [19,20]. It has been reported that an exercise requiring fast concentric contraction of the muscle is required in order to increase the muscle power [21]. The muscle power training using the band increases muscular strength and improves flexibility, parallelism, and walking; furthermore, it is also reported to have the advantages of minimizing the impact from muscular activation and movements in various angles [22]. Taking these results into account, the muscle power training by using exercise bands is considered to be the appropriate in performing low-intensity, fast-speed concentric contraction exercise in the elderly people.

Therefore, the effect of band exercise will be verified in this study, by applying the protocols of muscle power training to the elderly woman with blood glucose disorder.

The purpose of this study is to identify the effects of 12 weeks of muscle power training using the band on blood glucose, cytokine related to blood glucose, and physical function of the elderly women, who have fasting blood glucose disorder, which is known as the initial symptom of diabetes.

Aging brings many changes to the functional aspects of the human body. Among them, the representative ones are decreases in muscular strength and function. The cause of these physical changes can be loss of muscular fiber, decrease in exercise unit, and reduction of neuromuscular function. The muscular strength and function decline faster as aging progresses, and it results in glycometabolism imbalance which can eventually cause diabetes [4]. The representative cytokine regulating this glycometabolism is reported to be adiponection and IL-6 [24]. Adiponectin and IL-6 are decreased in secretion, as body fat increases due to aging; and when the muscles and their functions are improved, secretion also increases to regulate the glycometabolism [24]. IL-6 is known to be produced within the skeletal muscle by the muscle contraction during exercise, and decrease in glycogen concentration within the muscle to be released to the blood [25]. The regular exercise is reported to increase the adiponectin concentration within the blood to decrease the neutral fat and increase the insulin sensitivity [26]. In this study, after performing muscle power training using the band, the blood glucose decreased significantly, and adiponectin and IL-6 significantly increased with statistical significance. For this blood glucose control function, the main cause was regular resistance exercise increasing the capillary ratio of the muscular fiber, which improved the storage capacity of glycogen within the muscle and significantly decreased the glycated hemoglobin to activate the muscular tissue [27]. Recently, Mann et al. (2014) reported that resistance exercise improved insulin resistance to control glycometabolism, and also that aerobic exercise improves glycometabolism due to the increase in muscle and insulin receptor. The awareness about the importance of muscular strength exercise, in glycometabolism of the elderly people, should help with the musculoskeletal weakening of the aging people. To prevent the decrease in muscular function, resistance exercise is considered to be effective. Especially, the muscle power training performed in this study is considered to activate the muscle and the nerve [23], increase storage space, and regulate the glucose intake to control the blood glucose level. Therefore, the result of this study proved that 12 weeks of muscle power training made improvement in the blood glucose disorder of the elderly women.

The decrease in physical function for the elderly women with hyperglycemia, who lacked physical activity, exposed them to danger of falls and disability in their everyday lives [28]. In order to reduce these risks, the nerve and muscle functions must be improved through regular exercise [19]. In this study, 12 weeks of muscle power program was subjected to elderly women with hyperglycemia, and the exercise group showed significant increase in the physical performance ability test (SPPB) and muscular strength test, which proved that exercise effected in the change of physical function. In connection to this, our results coincided with the advanced study [29], in which the regular exercise program improved the physical performance ability and muscular strength of elderly women. Through this result, the performance of movements such as core training, lunge, and squat in the band exercise not only increase the muscular strength and function, but it is also considered to increase the overall physical ability by improving the physical performance. Therefore, the regular muscle power program using the band in this study is considered to improve the muscle and nerve functions of elderly women, and it also improved parallelism, coordination, and flexibility at the same time to reduce the danger of falls and to improve the overall quality of life.

In the advanced study on the elderly subjects, the sampling was limited to diabetic patients, and the age could not be matched. Therefore, it was difficult to directly compare the differences of several results of this study to other study results. For the effect of exercise intervention for the early stage of diabetes or the fasting blood glucose disorder, studies are very much lacking; and it is considered that describing the characteristic result of the subjects with fasting blood glucose disorder is difficult. Developing and studying various exercise programs are considered to be necessary in the future. The subjects with fasting blood glucose disorder should improve their muscular strength and function to prevent falls, and study on improving the quality of life must be continued.

In this study, as a result of performing muscle power program using the band on elderly women with hyperglycemia, exercise intervention effect was identified through the significant changes in the blood glucose, cytokine related to blood glucose, and physical performance ability. Moreover, based on the study results, improvements were observed in glycometabolism regulation, as well as in physical function of the elderly women with hyperglycemia. This study is expected to have positive effect on developing specialized exercise intervention programs, which can be applied to the subjects with glycometabolism disorder. In the future study, developing the diabetes preventive exercise program can delay the contraction speed from the fasting blood glucose disorder stage to diabetic stage.