The results of a new international study may support your efforts to design programs for clients who have experienced heart failure (and who have a doctor’s release). The “largest randomized clinical trial of exercise training ever performed” is now underway, involving 83 sites that will test 3,000 people to determine whether exercise is good for heart failure patients.

Although doctors have promoted exercise as valuable for a variety of disorders, “exercise training has not been definitively established as safe in the group of patients who primarily have heart failure,” said Dalane W. Kitzman, MD, a cardiologist and the principal investigator at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, in a press release.

“Controlled clinical trials have shown that exercise training improves physiological measurements” such as the distance that patients can walk in 6 minutes, researchers said after analyzing 14 trials. “None of these trials enrolled a sufficient number of patients to properly evaluate the impact of exercise training on death and hospitalization.” Kitzman added that the current trial “represents a critical step in establishing exercise as a therapy for patients with left ventricular dysfunction” (reduced heart contractions).