For adults with moderate-to-severe asthma who struggle to get to a gym, a new randomized trial suggests that adding roughly a thousand more steps to the day can improve symptoms about as much as supervised treadmill workouts.
The study, led by researchers at the University of São Paulo Medical School in Brazil and published in the journal Pulmonology in September 2026, tested two ways to get sedentary asthma patients moving.
The trial randomized 52 physically inactive adults aged 18 to 65 with uncontrolled moderate-to-severe asthma to one of two 8-week programs.
One group did 45-minute supervised treadmill sessions twice a week. The other met once a week for up to 90 minutes of counseling, wore a smartwatch and set weekly walking goals.
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Both interventions increased daily steps and improved asthma control, quality of life, and symptoms of anxiety and depression.
The gains held up four months after the programs ended.
What the step counts actually showed
Immediately after the 8 weeks, the treadmill group was walking about 1,537 more steps a day than at baseline, while the behavioral group added about 1,126 steps.
Four months later, the behavioral group had held onto slightly more of the change, at roughly 996 additional steps versus 983 for the treadmill group.
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Physical therapist David Halen Araújo Pinheiro, who led the doctoral research, said to Marriage News that "both interventions are beneficial for patients and provide better clinical control of the disease. And, based on our results, neither strategy outperformed the other."
The researchers point to earlier work suggesting a practical threshold. "In a previous study, we found that if a patient walks 7,500 steps a day, they already have better clinical control of their asthma," Pinheiro said.
Why this matters for people with asthma
Asthma is a chronic condition in which the airways narrow and inflame, making breathing difficult during flare-ups.
Globally, the disease affected an estimated 363 million people in 2023 and caused 442,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organization.
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In the United States, nearly 28 million people have asthma, including about 23 million adults, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America reports.
Many find structured exercise programs hard to reach or hard to sustain, which is part of why the walking finding is useful in daily life.
Regular physical activity has long been recommended as an add-on to inhaled medication for people with asthma, and past research already suggests that how often you exercise matters more for mental health than how hard you push.
The new trial extends that consistency-over-intensity idea to a specific respiratory disease.
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An add-on, not a swap for medication
The trial tested walking as a complement to standard treatment, not a replacement.
Pinheiro was explicit on that point. "Both aerobic training and behavioral intervention complement medication. We must never stop taking the treatment prescribed by our doctor," he said, referring to guidance from the Global Initiative for Asthma.
The study was small, with 52 participants, and focused on people with moderate-to-severe asthma who were already inactive.
The findings should not be read as a universal recommendation for every patient, and anyone with asthma who wants to increase activity should discuss it with their doctor first, particularly if their symptoms are not well controlled.
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For those cleared to move more, the trial's practical message is simple. Adding around 1,000 to 1,500 steps a day, tracked on a phone or a watch, was enough to shift asthma outcomes in a measurable way over eight weeks.
This article is made and published by Ida-Marie Palm Varbæk, who may have used AI in the preparation.