COPD: Rehab Therapy Improves Lactic Acid & Improves Exercise and Mobility

For patients with respiratory complications, the ability to perform even simple tasks at home can be challenging, let alone the ability to work out or perform exercise or fitness activities. For many, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease can result in not only a complication of respiration to the lungs, but an inability of the oxygen to pass through the muscle groups.

In an effort to improve the health of those who suffer from COPD, there has been a growing trend in the research of mobility and respiration and how the use of rehabilitation and therapy can improve the exercise tolerance in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD.

In the patient who suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), there is an increase need for ventilation during exercise and even in the most simples of tasks such as walking up stairs. In the past, research had shown that this ventilation need was restricted by the COPD complication itself.

However, in more recent research it has been determined that patients with COPD, even with low ventilation processes, can boost their tolerance for exercise and physical activity simply be enlisting, or using, the ambulatory muscles more often. This is to say if the COPD patient simply chooses to walk or engage in some degree of ambulatory movement, the muscles involved in that low aerobic movement may, ultimately, give back to the body what it lost as COPD developed, allowing for greater fitness levels even those ventilation is still restricted.

The key to this process is a physiological component known as lactic acidosis. When our muscles move, even slightly, there is a greater accumulation of lactic acidosis in the body. Lactic acidosis, then, promotes healing and lowers the body's necessity for increased ventilation with exercise. In fact, further research showed that the more muscle mass a COPD patient had, the greater the ability to tolerate exercise due to the use of lactic acid to offset the need for increased ventilation.