Are your mornings made of quick breakfasts and dashing to work? Hectic personal and work life prevent you from hitting the gym or go for those energizing walks? Too tired to even think of sweating it out in the evenings after a gruelling day?
You are not the only one! Many of us lead a crazily challenging life which does not allow us the luxuries of taking out time for some personal care and grooming.
Hey but that does not mean that we ignore the importance of physical health. After all, a healthy mind thrives only in a healthy body. So what do we do? In this situation, we can easily resort to climbing stairs as a convenient and viable weight loss method.
Climb stairs even when there is an urge to press and call the elevator or your feet seem to drag you towards the escalators. Fight the demon and climb the stairs! Climbing stairs is a good form of exercise which takes care of your physical as well as mental health. Let us look at a few benefits of climbing stairs.
- Climbing stairs helps you burn more calories every minute as compared to jogging.
- Climbing stairs helps our body produce endorphins – the hormones known for creating a sense of happiness in our mind. Ultimately, whatever we do in life aims at a quest for happiness and if climbing stairs can give us the double whammy of losing weight and producing “happy hormones”, why not go for it each time there is an opportunity?
- Weight loss is another benefit of climbing stairs.
- Climbing stairs is a great form of cardio exercise. While climbing stairs, you work against gravity lifting your entire body. This activity strengthens your leg muscles making it a rather strenuous exercise.
- Some believe that taking two stairs at a time helps you lose more weight. Let me tell you, it is not true. It just makes your strides longer and without making you lose any burn any extra calories than you would if you took one stair at a time. The only good thing about taking two stairs at a time is that you reach your destination faster!
- Ever realized the reason why climbing the stairs downwards is much easier than climbing them up? It is because when you are climbing down the stairs, you are working with the gravitational force while when you are climbing up the stairs, you are working on it. And working against the gravitational force needs much more energy which naturally makes you burn more calories. For this reason, climbing down the stairs helps you burn calories but not as much as climbing makes you do.
- Climbing stairs helps you improve your heart rate and health. The consistent movement of your legs and hips results in deeper breathing increasing your heartbeat, which leads to increased blood flow in all of your body.
- Another benefit of climbing stairs is that it leads to stronger joints and muscles.
- Doctors recommend climbing stairs as an ideal way to improve your energy, develop your immune system, and lower your risk for diabetes, high blood pressure, osteoporosis [2] and heart disease.
- Climbing stairs are definitely the most convenient form of exercise which reaps great results. There is no equipment cost as well as space issues. We don’t even have to learn this exercise from any other source as we have all learnt it during our childhood. And the best part is that it burns twice as many calories as walking does.
Comparative Study Between Climbing Stairs and Walking
Walking and climbing stairs are two of the most common forms of exercises each with their own benefits for health and weight loss. While walking carries its own set of advantages, climbing stairs gives you an edge over it.
Because climbing stairs requires you to work against gravity, it leads you to use more energy and thus burn more calories. Given the nature of the exercise, you end up burning two to three times more energy than brisk walking.
The Harvard Alumni Study, one of the biggest scientific studies to date, found that men who climbed an average of eight or more flights of stairs a day had a 33% lower mortality rate than their sedentary counterparts.
The researchers from McMaster University suggest recruited 31 sedentary but healthy people and made them complete two separate stair-climbing protocols: The first involved three, 20-second spurts of climbing and the second protocol required the participants to climb up and down one flight of stairs for 60 seconds.
Both these protocols took ten minutes each including warm-up, cool-down and recovery periods. The participants were made to repeat these two workout protocols thrice a week.
In the end, it was discovered that the exercise led to an improved state of the participants’ cardio-respiratory health, which means the ability of your circulatory, respiratory, and muscular systems to supply enough oxygen to your body during exercise.
Who Should Avoid Climbing Stairs As A Form Of Exercise?
Though climbing stairs offers a wide range of benefits as discussed above in the article, it may prove to be unsuitable for people with acute heart ailments and also for those suffering from knee, ankle or hip problems.
Even people with shaky limbs should avoid taking the stairs as there is always a threat of a fall. Any of you with these problems and symptoms considering to take up climbing stairs as an exercise must consult it with your doctor before starting this.
So ditch the elevators and take the stairs – with consistent efforts come great results and weight loss by climbing stairs is one such endeavour.
Initially, you would feel your breath going totally out of control but with time, as you master the art of channelizing your energies towards climbing stairs, your breathing pattern will start playing a better sport, making the activity easier for you.
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