Clinicians at the Universidade de São Paulo have shown that encouraging asthma patients to walk more each day can deliver benefits comparable to formal aerobic training. In a randomised clinical trial run at the Hospital das Clínicas, the hospital complex administered by USP's medical school, adults with uncontrolled moderate to severe asthma were assigned either to supervised 45-minute treadmill sessions twice a week or to a behavioural programme designed to increase everyday step counts, each lasting eight weeks.
Neither strategy outperformed the other. Both groups saw improvements in quality of life and in respiratory and anxiety symptoms over the medium term, and the gains persisted at follow-up four months later. The aerobic group's daily step gain declined from 1,537 immediately after the intervention to 983 at follow-up, while the behavioural group moved from 1,126 to 996, leaving the simpler intervention slightly ahead on that measure.
The findings, published in the journal Pulmonology, matter for health systems because supervised exercise requires equipment, space and trained staff that many clinics cannot provide. A behavioural programme built around walking is cheap, scalable and accessible to patients far from specialist centres. The researchers stress that physical activity complements rather than replaces asthma medication, but the result gives clinicians a pragmatic, evidence-based option for a disease that affects millions of Brazilians.