For anyone with asthma who has ever felt too intimidated or too worn out to start a formal exercise program, a new study offers a welcome shortcut. Getting people to walk more and sit less, with coaching and a fitness tracker, worked about as well as structured treadmill workouts for controlling asthma symptoms.
Researchers in Brazil put 52 adults with moderate to severe, poorly controlled asthma through one of two eight-week programs, according to findings published in the journal Pulmonology. One group did supervised treadmill training twice a week. The other met with a health coach once a week and used a wearable activity tracker to nudge them into moving more throughout the day, without any formal exercise sessions. Both groups ended up breathing easier, feeling less anxious, and reporting a better quality of life, and those gains mostly held up four months later.
That result matters because starting an exercise routine can feel like a tall order for someone who struggles to catch their breath climbing stairs. Many people with asthma avoid physical activity altogether because they fear triggering symptoms, and that inactivity itself has been linked to worse disease control. There is more than one path to feeling better here, and patients do not have to choose the toughest one.
Setting Up the Asthma Control Study
Researchers recruited adults between 18 and 65 who had moderate to severe asthma that was not well controlled, based on their medication needs and symptom scores. Participants also had to be physically inactive at the start, getting less than the recommended amount of moderate to vigorous activity each week, as measured by a small motion-tracking device worn on the body.
Fifty-two people were randomly split into two groups. Twenty-seven were assigned to treadmill training, working out twice a week for 45 minutes a session over eight weeks, at an intensity set by an individual fitness test. The other 25 were assigned to a coaching program, meeting with a health professional once a week for up to 90 minutes. Instead of formal workouts, that group focused on building daily habits: they wore a commercial fitness tracker set to buzz when they hit a step goal or when they had been sitting still for an hour, and reviewed their progress with a coach who helped them set realistic goals and work through obstacles.
Both groups also attended an asthma education session, and everyone kept taking their prescribed asthma medications throughout. Researchers checked in three times: before the programs started, right after the eight weeks ended, and again four months later. They measured asthma symptom control using a standard questionnaire, along with quality of life, anxiety and depression symptoms, sleep, body composition, and how much people actually moved during the day.
Nearly 9 in 10 participants were women. A typical participant was carrying extra weight, dealing with multiple health conditions, and showing signs of anxiety or depression along with a lower quality of life. That combination lines up with what other research has found about who tends to struggle most with uncontrolled asthma.
What Researchers Found About Asthma Control
Both groups saw meaningful drops in their asthma symptom scores by the end of the eight weeks, large enough by standard scoring guidelines to count as a real improvement in day-to-day symptoms. That improvement held up four months later in both groups, with no meaningful gap between the treadmill group and the coaching group. Roughly two-thirds of participants in each group still showed a clinically meaningful improvement at the four-month mark.
Quality of life scores climbed in both groups too, again by an amount considered clinically meaningful, and those gains also stuck around at follow-up. Anxiety and depression symptoms eased in both groups as well. Neither group showed changes in sleep quality or body composition.
A couple of results ran counter to expectations. Aerobic training usually lifts a person’s peak fitness, but the treadmill group saw no such bump, which the researchers tied to participants already having fairly well-preserved lung and heart fitness at the start, or to the program running only eight weeks. The coaching group’s daily step counts did climb over the eight weeks, though the researchers felt the gains fell short of what earlier behavioral programs have produced and pointed to that group’s higher body weight, which other studies have linked to a weaker response. Either way, both groups logged more weekly minutes of moderate to vigorous activity, the kind that gets the heart working.
Both groups also reported fewer personal and everyday barriers to being active after their programs, such as feeling too tired or not having a safe place to exercise, and those improvements remained at follow-up.