Grant: Project Grant

All adults acquire and inherit characteristics that vary substantially. In response to an exercise treatment aimed at improving health, these characteristics may modify the effect of the treatment, making it more or less beneficial or ineffective in different individuals. The issue of individual responses to exercise is therefore one of the most important in exercise medicine, yet few researchers acknowledge the issue in their published studies, and attempts to quantify individual responses to exercise are rare. We submit that this climate of neglect needs to change, especially now that monitoring of individuals can provide researchers with the subject characteristics that account for individual responses to exercise and allow more efficient targeting of treatments to help ensure benefit. To our knowledge the proposed trial is the first to consider whether alterations in exercise amount and intensity can increase rate of positive/beneficial response among individuals who do not respond to first line therapy (the consensus recommendation).