The increased muscle strength after RT is in line with the effects found for patients with mild COPD after RT with the same frequency and similar intensities.31 For the RT group, there were no signs of a decline in endurance parameters (Table 2), which might have been expected after patients left the multimodal training programme of IPR. Circuit weight training improves endurance in healthy individuals.26 One-legged knee extensions required a ventilation of 80% of VEpeak for COPD patients with a FEV1 of 40% of predicted.32 It is conceivable that multiple repetition weight lifting generate ventilatory responses that approximate the effects of ET, at least for the patients with the lowest FEV1.