Weight Training and Backpacking in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Abstract

We have observed that muscular patients with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) appear to function better in activities of daily living than do compara-bly obstructed patients who are not muscular. Accordingly, we designed an innovative home weight-lifting program to improve muscularity in patients with severe COPD. After 6 weeks of training, all seven weight-lifting patients had reduced their minute ventilation during bicycle ergometry at each stage of exercise (P < 0.05) and overall (P <0.005), and their walking endurance had increased by 16% (P<0.005). A matched control group of seven patients, who did not weight lift, failed to improve. This suggested to us that weight lifting might have caused the development of an alternative but effective anaerobic muscle energy system that improved performance by enhanc-ing ventilatory efficiency during exertion. A second activity, done by all 14 patients and used to keep the controls motivated, involved backpacking slowly at home for 5 minutes a day. The weight lifters adapted to both the progressive backpacking and weight-lifting routine, whereas the controls, who backpacked but did not weight lift, did not improve in endurance and showed an actual deterioration in performance as a result of carrying the same increasingly heavy load as the weight lifters'. However, backpacking in both groups did result in strength improvement and a reduction in abnormally elevated lung volumes, particularly the controls' functional residual ca-pacity (P < 0.01) and total lung capacity (P < 0.001).