Stair Climbing – an Easy Way to Exercise?
Photo by twenty_questions
Anyone who has ever climbed to the top of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris or the Statue of Liberty in New York will tell you that stair climbing is not an easy exercise but you have to admit it’s something that you can easily fit into your everyday life.
Stairs are everywhere and you may as well make use of them.
In fact, keen exercisers in cities as far apart as Boston and San Francisco are starting to use skyscraper stair-climbs as their workout of choice – a 15 minute stair climb offers the same workout as 30 minutes running on flat ground and with less impact.
Even those of us without access to a nearby skyscraper can benefit from the stairs at the office, in the home or at the shopping mall. Every flight you climb counts – a Harvard University study found that men who climbed an average of at least 8 flights a day had a 33% lower mortality rate than men who were sedentary. And research in Northern Ireland has also shown that walking upstairs for just 6 minutes a day will make you 10 to 15 percent fitter.
Climbing stairs will firm your butt, your legs and your stomach – one reason why stair climbing machines at the gym are becoming more popular and why they are taking off as home exercise equipment. Just look at the range of stair climbers and steppers
But even if you don’t have a gym membership or space for a stair climber at home, you can integrate stair climbing into your day. Just remember when you see a sign for the elevator to look for the stairs instead and get firm and fit without taking up your precious free time.
And if you are looking for a new home don’t look at stairs as a disadvantage – that top floor appartment may be just what you need 
Tagged With exercise, exercise equipment, stair climbers, stair climbing, stairs, workout
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32 Responses to “Stair Climbing – an Easy Way to Exercise?”
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What is the proper way to climb stairs? I find that my knees start to hurt if I do a lot of flights in one day. I love the exercise and strength benefits and climb the stairs at my office. I don’t wear high heels, but sometimes the stairs do a number on my knees.
Hi Sharon
I’m not sure there is a right way to do it – though there probably is – I just didn’t hear about it.
If you have a weakness in one area it’s probably best to work on strengthening that area before doing exercises which make it worse.
Here’s a series of videos on strengthening your knees:-
http://www.ehow.com/video_2359475_information-knee-injuries-exercise.html
Hope that helps
Jan
Will stair climbing stretches our knee ligaments and cause knee problems in the old age due to too much wear and tear? i climb 16 – 20 stories a day 4 stories each time and would like to know. any feedback would be appreciated.
It doesn’t sound excessive Joel (I am up and down 2 flights of stairs in my home at least that often just in the natural course of the day and never thought about it as damaging just getting the house clean and tidy etc) but every one reacts differently to exercise so it’s hard to say any long term effects. Hips wear out, knees wear out just with daily wear and tear anyway in many older people. It depends what your body is susceptible to. The best course of action I believe is to vary your activity as much as possible so that you don’t continually put the same stress on the same joints and ligaments all the time.
Hi, i only have 13 steps in my house, I was wondering if it would be “easier” to just go up say, 4 stairs and back down and up again..Rather than go all the way up and and turn around and so on. Any advice would be appreciated.
I think I would find 4 steps more difficult to keep track of and I think more dangerous because it’s easy to lose track of where you are when you can’t get any rhythm going. If you’re not keen on using a whole flight at a time them buy something like a Reebok step that you can just step on and off or use the bottom step of your stairs only.
Anyway what’s with the “easier”? This is supposed to be work and effort so that you get fitter
Question: Harvard University Men’s Health states that 8 flights of stairs is a very good exercise. I have tried to find out how many steps are in this flight of stairs? We have 28 stairs in 4 …..what I call flights of stairs…7 per flight….. and I am wondering if this qualifies if I do the 28 steps 8 times a day?
Anyone got any ideas?
Thanks, Louis
I think of about 12 to 13 steps as being a flight – so if you have 4 flights of 7 steps that’s about 2 flights I would think. It’s really the distance between floors of a building but it varies because of how high your ceilings are! I live in an old house so there are about 20 steps between the ground and the first floor because of the high ceilings. There are about 13 steps in modern buildings however.
Jan
Our flight of stairs to the basement at home has 11 risers, but there’s an I-beam that holds up the house that I have to duck under when using them. That wasn’t satisfactory so I decided to stay at the bottom at just step up one riser, then back down, repeating as many times as I wanted then switching feet and stepping up with the other foot.
I realized that over time I’d wear out the carpet on that bottom step so I built myself a mock stair step – a sturdy stool 8″ tall and carpeted like the stairs.
That’s what I’ve been using for the past six months and it works great. I break my exercise into five segments. The first is 3.5 minutes stepping up with the left foot followed by 3.5 min with the right. Next segment is 3 min each, then 2.5 min each, and the last two are two min each. That’s 26 min total. My pace is 26 steps per minute, so that comes to 676 steps, or the equivalent of 45 flights of stairs in a commercial building at 15 steps per flight.
After starting out with this stair stepping program it didn’t take long before I found I couldn’t keep my heart rate up to my target anymore – was was getting in too good a shape, so I added a twist. I have a couple of 3 lb dumbells so now I pump them as I step. I do a one-arm curl with each step. That adds enough effort to bring my heart rate up to my target (134 bpm). It also gives me 676 curls with each arm everyday and I’ve ended up with some biceps I hadn’t planned on.
BTW, I’m 62. I retired six years ago and am in better shape now than any time since basic training almost 45 years ago.
Thanks for the stair climbing article. You’re absolutely right, it’s a great way to stay in shape.
For those concerned about the knees, I live in a 30 story apartment and climb the building 4 to 5 times per workout, 3 times per week (roughly 5400 stairs weekly). I’m 46 years old and have maintained this routine for almost 3 years with absolutely no hint of knee problems.
I have to admit I’m hooked. When I moved last January one of my primary criteria for a new place to live was to find a tall enough building!
By Jove! I work on the sixth floor of a building. I’m SO going to start taking the stairs from the parking garage.
I am looking for something that I can do during the winter (I do not want to walk outside in the cold and snow). I have a single step that I got from a yard sale…I do not have the extensions that you put under it to make it taller though. Will this be good enough for me to use? Also, how long do I need to exercise each day and how many times a week?
A single step will be fine to start you off on a good footing in 2010. Your program should depend on your current level of fitness. I suggest that you start off at a level you feel comfortable with (even if that is just a few minutes at a time) and gradually increase it. A heart rate monitor is a good idea to assess how hard you are working.
Do you think 30 minutes a day, 4 days a week is a good workout? I have worked out at the gym before but its been about a year. I really need to lose about 50 pounds.
Yes, that’s a good workout depending on the intensity. But it would also be good to vary the type of exercise you do if you can manage it.
If you are exercising to help with weight loss then you need to look at your diet. It is much more difficult to lose weight if you only work on exercise and not on food intake.
You have to run more than a marathon to lose a pound of fat, yet eating 500 calories less than you need each day for a week and you’ll lose that pound.
I know which I would find easier – your results may vary
I would like to know how many calories do you burn doing stairs in a building of seven floors? I do the treadmill 30 to 45 min. each week day but would like to add more workouts by doing stairs. I have a bad knee so I take it slowly when I do the stairs.
Your help will be deeply appreciated.
I’m also on Spark People and track my workouts and food intake everyday but found none on stair climbing.
Margaret, according to The Diet Bible stair climbing uses 9 calories per minute for a person weighing 147lb. If your weight is a lot different you can calculate it with 3.7 calories per pound per hour. If you are going slowly you would probably reduce this – so if an average person would walk up the stairs twice as fast as you, divide the number of calories burned in half.
Thanks for this great information – we are starting a stair climbing club at work and I want to know if it is best to only climb stairs? One of my co-workers suggested that it would really wear out your knees climbing 5 flights of stairs but she said we should take the elevator back down to prevent knee problems. Please let me know your thoughts?
Unless you have knee problems I don’t think 5 flights is excessive (even daily) but I must admit I like to vary my exercise so that there is no strain on any one joint or muscle. I never heard of anyone having a problem going downstairs. I would have thought going up would be more of a strain if anything. But five flights is not that much anyway. You have to learn to watch out for signs of strain and stop an exercise if it is adversely affecting your body in any way. Never follow a program without thought or to excess. Do what is right for you personally no matter what the program says and rest if anything is starting to hurt.
Climbing upstairs is a perfect exercise but I think going downstairs can be harmful (or at lease a waste of time).
What I do is to use the elevator to go down and restart climbing as soon as possible. And I close my stopwatch in the elevator.
I am walking about 7-8 miles a week on the treadmill. For weight-loss would it make a difference if I walked 1 mile a day which takes about 20 minutes versus 1.5 – 1.75 miles which is about 30-35 minutes to equal my 7-8 miles?
OOPS i forgot to say that the 1.5-1.75 miles would be within a 4 day period of time…..
Sorry Jenny, I’m not clear about what you’re asking me to calculate here even if math were my favorite subject (which it isn’t).
So I’ll just say, as a general principle, don’t be mean with your exercise. Give it all you can (without going dangerously overboard) and tackle it with as much enthusiasm as you can rather than worrying about whether one regime is better than another.
If you don’t like an exercise so much that you are doing the bare minimum, find another you do like – dancing or ice skating or something you can really get into.
Walking on the other hand is great for weight loss but you need to walk for about 30 miles to lose a pound of fat. It’s up to you how much you lose from exercise and how much from eating less.
Jan
OK, you answered my question. I was wondering if its better to walk for 30 mins at a time rather than 20 mins to lose weight. thanks
Hi Jenny
If you’d only made it nice and simple for me like that LOL
If you can do 30 minutes a day, that is great and every calorie helps.
One thing you can do is to alternate moderate walking and fast walking in one minute intervals after a 5 minute warm up period. That really gets things moving and means that you burn more calories in your 30 minutes if that is all the time you have.
Sorry…I guess I wasn’t thinking clearly when I wrote that..LOL. Thank you for the information.
What about people with back problems? Has anyone had pain from stairs due to back or spine problems?
Stair climbing is probably not the best exercise if you have back problems. You can probably tell already which exercises make your back hurt more if you are self aware and watch the effect of any movement but always consult a professional before you take on any kind of exercise if there is any doubt about your health. Why risk making things worse?
Jan
I’m a75 years of age male and had a pinched nerve in the spine last year which caused severe pain.
However, I need to lose a lot of waist fat. If climbing stairs is not the ideal for persons with back problems, then what is the best exercise. I’m told running is also out.
Carl
Best consult a medical practitioner Carl about an fitness or exercise plan as I can’t prescribe one for you without knowing your exact condition
Hey Im climbing steps from Lowerbasement to 16th floor x3 in the morning and at least 1 set of this in the evening after work. Is it effective for losing body weight including stomach fat.
Please help
Hey Makhosi – it should help but you will only lose weight by stair climbing if it means you are now using more energy than you are eating. Regulating food intake is the best way to lose weight. Exercise just helps – as well as keeping you healthy and feeling positive so it is worth it on that score anyway
Jan