By Annabel Bourne
While it is tempting to take the lift or escalator rather than use the stairs, even scaling just a few flights a day could give your health and mind a boost.
According to research, climbing stairs can have surprising benefits for both your physical health and your brain without needing to hurtle up two steps at a time or break records.
Climbing stairs has been found to improve balance and reduce the risk of falling for older people and improve their lower body strength.
Other studies also find that climbing a couple of flights of stairs can positively affect our cognitive abilities such as problem-solving, memory, and potentially creative thinking.
As a “low impact” form of exercise, even short bursts of stair climbing can help improve cardiorespiratory fitness and reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.
The improvements in aerobic fitness from climbing stairs at home can even be equivalent to those gained using stair machines at the gym.
It’s this everyday simplicity that is stair-climbing’s greatest strength. Stairs are everywhere – we encounter them at home, at work and in public.
Choosing to take the stairs instead of hopping on an escalator or riding in a lift provides us with an incidental form of exercise that can have an outsized impact on our health.
“It’s an exercise that nearly everybody can perform because they have access, and they do it on the daily basis,” says Alexis Marcotte-Chenard, a postdoctoral research fellow in heart, lung and vascular health at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, Canada.
Marcotte-Chenard has been researching how to use exercise and nutrition to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, including the effects of “exercise snacks” – brief, spaced-out periods of vigorous activity lasting one minute or less that are performed throughout the day.
Stair climbing, he says, is a promising exercise snack as it can be easily adjusted in difficulty by varying pace and requires no complex equipment or cost.
“When you do exercise snacks, you don’t need any fancy equipment, you can just use your own body, you can use stairs,” says Marcotte-Chenard. “And if you’re doing physical activity throughout the day, you don’t have to dedicate an hour for your workout.”
Research into exercise snacks, also nicknamed “snacktivity,” or “VILPA” (vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity), is on the rise as researchers search for the best exercise solution to combat sedentary habits and physical inactivity which currently puts approximately 1.8 billion adults worldwide at risk of disease.
But what makes stairs such an effective physical workout?
First, climbing stairs is an easy way to elevate your heart rate – an important part of getting physiological benefits.
But there are unique benefits of stair-climbing compared to other forms of exercise.
“It increases your heart rate and your oxygen consumption more than if you do fast walking just because it’s harder to go against gravity,” says Marcotte-Chenard, “And then, if you talk about the muscle, it’s mostly the lower body, and we know that lower body strength is a good indicator of overall health and longevity.”
Climbing stairs can increase thigh muscle size and strength, and also requires use of the abdominal muscles for stabilisation going upwards.
You may not even have to sprint up the staircase to get the benefits.
Whilst taking two steps at a time can be more difficult, requiring greater work by the muscles around your ankle and knee, the research is split about whether you actually burn more calories going up one step at a time.
And there is another reason to choose the staircase over the stair machine at the gym – going downstairs.
The muscles at the front of your thighs contract in two different ways: when walking upstairs they will shorten, known as concentric contraction, and when walking downstairs they lengthen, known as eccentric contraction.
Although concentric contractions require more oxygen, burn more calories during the exercise itself and are considered more difficult, repeating eccentric contractions is more likely to result in bigger and stronger muscle growth.
This is because eccentric contractions cause greater muscle damage during exercise and so more calories are burnt long-term during repair and recovery.
The benefits don’t end with muscular thighs either. Researchers have found that stair-climbing results in surprising improvements in cognitive ability.
Andreas Stenling is an associate professor psychology at Umeå University, Sweden, who primarily researches the longer-term relationships between physical activity and health. He and his colleagues studied the immediate effects of stair-climbing on different cognitive abilities in young adults.
“Inhibition and switching were the two main cognitive functions we focused on here,” says Stenling, “Cognitive switching, sometimes called mental flexibility, is how easy we’re able to switch between cognitive tasks,” he says. “So, going from one task to the other without having to reset your cognition, so to speak. Inhibition is about blocking out irrelevant information while you’re engaged in the task.” Stenling explains that we know that these cognitive functions are important for learning, cognitive word tasks, abstract thinking, and being able to keep your thoughts on one thing.
Stenling and colleagues found that their stair-climbing exercise significantly improved participants’ “switching” abilities, which is also considered the most difficult of the cognitive tasks tested for. They also tested for changes in mood, finding that participants felt happier and more energetic after stair-climbing.
Another study published by researchers at the Yamaguchi University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan also found that people who climbed two flights of stairs displayed more focused problem solving than those who took the elevator. Intriguingly, there weren’t any improvements in problem solving when they climbed five or eight flights of stairs, suggesting the effect is not dependent upon the number of stairs. Another study by the same group also found that walking downstairs led to an increase in creative thinking, generating 61% more original ideas than those who travelled using a lift. So if you are looking for a burst of inspiration on a problem you are trying to solve, a quick jaunt up to the next floor and back may be all you need.
