Exercise Rehabilitation for Heart Failure and Associated Cardiomyopathies

To summarize and provide insight into the role of exercise rehabilitation for heart failure, cardiomyopathies and associated conditions. We provide an overview of the evolution of exercise training from “bed rest” to current guidelines and highlight emerging approaches.

Exercise training appears to be safe and provide benefits for patients with heart failure. Emerging evidence also suggests potential benefit in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy as well as angina with non-obstructive coronary arteries, though more data are needed for widespread implementation.

Given appropriate precautions and clinical assessments, exercise is a unifying therapy across most heart failure conditions regardless of ejection fraction. Exercise training appears to be safe, and beneficial in terms of improvements in functional capacity and health-related quality of life. Larger controlled trials are needed to better examine the impact of exercise on hard clinical endpoints such as HF hospitalizations (likely beneficial) and cardiovascular mortality.