Diabetes mellitus is often associated with a cardiomyopathy characterized by alterations in cardiac metabolism and declines in cardiac performance. We sought to determine whether exercise training would attenuate the depressed cardiac performance seen in diabetic animals. Female rats were divided into four groups: sedentary control, trained control, sedentary diabetics, and trained diabetics. After 1 week of training, we induced diabetes by intravenous injection of streptozotocin (65 mg/kg). We trained animals on a treadmill using a progressive protocol that plateaued at 27 m/min for 1 hr/day, 5 days/week for a total of 8 weeks. We measured cardiac output at a variety of left atrial filling pressures with an isolated working heart apparatus; glucose was the sole metabolic substrate for the heart. Training increased succinate dehydrogenase activity in the soleus muscle of exercised rats, but did not change heart and body weights or plasma glucose and thyroid hormone levels. The diabetic groups exhibited depressed cardiac outputs at high workloads compared to nondiabetics. Training increased the cardiac output of both sedentary and diabetic animals at high, but not low, preloads. We suggest that exercise can attenuate the severity of diabetic cardiomyopathy.