You should not exercise without oxygen if your oxygen saturation goes below 88 %. They should be measuring it at the rehab program when you exercise.

What does your oximeter say? If you go below 88 while exercising, you need the supplemental O2; if you can keep your sats up through proper breathing techniques, you don't necessarily need the O2. That's the official line.

If you really want to be a little bit obnoxious, but still make your point, ask the RT running the program to walk on the TM for 5 minutes at 4 miles an hour and see what her oximeter readings are. If she's in any sort of shape, they'll probably be in the mid-90s and my question to her would be, why am I a second class citizen? You may find that you can exercise much longer, harder and faster with the O2 and your sats in the 90s than without, and the more you can do, the better off you are.

The point of pulmonary rehab is to help you learn how to get into good shape. That means being able to work yourself into being really sob and knowing how to recover through using proper breathing techniques (and you'll find that if you use those breathing techniques from the beginning, you may not get so sob and won't have to recover); learning how to exercise on your own and keep pushing a little bit every week or so. If you learn those things in PR, you will have learned the essential skills necessary for a good life with COPD.

Exercising or exerting yourself for extended periods without oxygen will enlarge your heart and could shorten your life. Listen to your doctor, not the therapist
.

My oxygen level decreases on exertion. Just standing up it decreases. I go to pulmonary rehab twice a week. I have emphysema. We can't exercise without oxygen. We turn ours off and use theirs. They tell us to turn it up if we need extra.

Yes. I use 2L us usually but my Dr said when moving around A lot or exercising I should be on three or four seems to keep my oxygen up