“…Therefore, at the outset of the study, the total exercise time and amount of work done per session by each member of the IT group was designed to equate to the work that these patients would have done had they been assigned to the CT group. One of the training principles [18] requires that exercise intensity should be optimally maintained relative to peak exercise capacity and should parallel the improvement in physical status throughout the exercise programme [19][20][21]. Therefore, it was decided to increase the training intensity by an equal magnitude in both groups on a monthly basis so that, during the second and third months, it represented 60 and 70% and 120 and 140% of the baseline PWR in the CT and IT groups, respectively.…”