This article evaluated the pulmonary function (PF) and respiratory muscle strength (RMS) changes and efficacy of two distinct protocols of intervention in patients undergoing cardiac surgery (CS) with cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). METHOD: Twenty-one patients were randomly assigned: GPPB (n = 8): performed respiratory exercises with IPPB associated to physiotherapy intervention (PI) and GPI (n = 13) performed PI only. The PF was assessed by spirometry on preoperative and fifth postoperative (PO) day and RMS by the maximal respiratory pressures (PImax and PEmax) on preoperative, 1st PO and 5th PO. The Wilcoxon, Friedman and Man-Whitney tests were used for intragroup and intergroups comparisons, respectively. RESULTS: No significant differences were observed in anthropometric parameters, clinical and surgical aspects between groups. Significantly lower values on 5th PO in comparison to the preoperative situation was found in GPI to the variables of vital capacity (VC), forced vital capacity (FVC), expiratory forced volume in the 1st second (FEV1), expiratory peak flow (PF) and expiratory forced flow (FEF[25-75%]). However, for GPPB, only the FEV1 remained significantly reduced after intervention (p < 0.05). PImax and PEmax showed significant decrease from preoperative to 1st PO in both groups, but only PEmax reached values near to the preoperative values until 5thPO in both groups, while PImax remained significantly reduced in GPI. In the intergroup analysis, there were no significant differences to neither of analyzed variables. CONCLUSION: We concluded that patients undergoing CS with CPB suffer damages in PF and RMS, and none of the applied treatments (PI or PI plus IPPB) showed significant superiority to the other one.

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