This study had some limitations. We considered the amount of exercise as the total amount, and did not perform content analysis of the physical therapy exercises. The present study was also not stratified according to higher brain dysfunction. In addition, although the subjects of the two groups of PT3unit group and PT6unit group were respectively selected from two year intervals of 2005–2006 and 2010–2015 under the each condition, the number of patients of the two year intervals was different and we had more patients in the 2nd year interval. While the number of PT3unit group patients cover a higher percentage of the whole patients of the 1st year interval, the number of PT6unit group patients include a lower percentage of the large number of patients in the 2nd year interval. In future, examining these issues is necessary because of the potential for bias. Because of the low percentage of reporting from the acute-care hospital to the convalescent rehabilitation ward, we were unable to classify the type of stroke. When the profiles of patients with complete paralysis in both groups were compared, the ages of patients in the PT6unit group were significantly lower than that of patients in the PT3unit group. After investigation of the association between the increased amount of exercise and the age-specific ADL improvement in patients with stroke in the convalescent ward, it was found that the ADL was greatly improved in patients who were aged in their 60s with low ADL compared to patients who were 70 years or older19). Although the age differences may influence these results, these issues will be addressed in future studies because we did not examine them in this study, due to the small sample sizes.