Hopefully, you do a structured workout most days of the week. If not, what are you waiting for? Exercise is the best free medicine, and you don’t have to join a gym to get the benefits. The trend these days is to work out at home on your own schedule so that you’re in control. With home workouts, you call the shots and that makes it easier to stick with it!
Why should you move your body? Staying physically active lowers your risk of a number of health problems, including the biggest life shorteners of modern society, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. If you already do a workout most days, good for you! Most people, unfortunately, do not. In fact, research shows less than 25% of people meet the recommended guidelines for physical activity–at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise weekly or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise.
But there’s another problem that plagues society–too much sitting. Research shows sitting too long is an independent risk factor for health problems, including cardiovascular disease, and the propensity to sit increases the risk of premature mortality. Our bodies are made to move and we’re not moving them enough! They weren’t made to stay in one position for eight hours per day.
How bad is the problem? According to JustStand.org, the average person sits 12 hours per day on average. That sounds bad, and it is! But you can mitigate some risk by taking frequent walking, stretching, and, as a new study shows, stair climbing breaks throughout the day. In fact, this study shows that you can improve your cardiorespiratory fitness with short periods of stair climbing.
Stair Climbing “Snacks” and Why They’re Good for You
Researchers at McMaster University in Canada recently did a study looking at sprint interval training. You’re probably already familiar with sprinting. You go hard for short periods of time and then partially recover before doing it again. Since the participants in the study were sedentary, they modified the training to be more newbie friendly, and they wanted it to be an activity people could use to break up periods of sitting. So, they asked the subjects to climb three flights of stairs three times per day for six weeks. In between the stair climbing sessions, the participants had several hours to recover. Another group of subjects did no exercise and served as a control group. Before each session, the participants did a dynamic warm-up consisting of ten air squats, ten jumping jacks, and five lunges.
The results? Despite the fact that the experimental subjects only did short, stair climbing sessions three times daily and rested for more than an hour between sessions, they experienced improvements in their cardiovascular fitness. Cardiovascular fitness is the ability of the heart and lungs to deliver oxygen to tissues and for tissues, including muscle, to use that oxygen efficiently. One measurement of cardiovascular fitness is V02 max, also known as aerobic capacity. In this study, participants experienced an average improvement of around 5%. That’s less than the boost in VO2 max the average person gets with sustained aerobic training, but it’s still significant. On average, a person can increase their aerobic capacity by 20% through training. But what’s remarkable is that they were able to become modestly fitter aerobically by simply climbing stairs a few times per day. The participants who stair climbed also showed an increase in cycling peak power output.
Short Bursts of Exercise Rock!
This isn’t the first study to show that brief periods of exercise, such as climbing stairs, can boost aerobic capacity and have other benefits as well. What’s different about this study is that the recovery periods between bouts of exercise were as little as an hour and as much as 4 hours. When the same researchers carried out a similar study a few years earlier, the average gains in V02 max was 12%, but in this study, the recovery periods between stair climbing bouts was only a few minutes in length.
It’s encouraging that such short periods of exercise several times per day can boost aerobic capacity. But keep in mind that the participants were previously sedentary, and they didn’t experience as much of a boost in aerobic capacity as the average person can achieve through more intensive training. Yet the researchers point out that these exercise “snacks” still have health and fitness benefits. Beyond potentially boosting aerobic capacity, they reduce the negative impact of sitting for long periods of time.
Set Up Your Own Exercise Snacks
A few sessions of intense stair climbing at work will, at the very least, help break up periods of sitting. If you already do some form of aerobic exercise or high-intensity interval training when you aren’t at work, you might not see a boost in aerobic capacity. However, even short periods of movements, particularly intense movement, are good for your metabolic health. Even short exercise sessions boost insulin sensitivity.
So, take advantage of your lunch or break time and head for the stairs. If you get two breaks and a lunch hour, you can fit in three sessions of stair climbing in a workday, just as they did in the study. Be sure to bring along a pair of exercise shoes! You probably don’t want to sprint up the stairs in dress shoes or heels. If you don’t have access to stairs, head outdoors and walk intensely for a few minutes, recover, and repeat a few times. All movement counts when it comes to your health! At the very least, break up sitting with some form of movement of activity at least every hour. Don’t forget, prolonged sitting is also linked with a high risk of blood clots in the lower legs! Try to stand more at work, too. Standing burns more calories and allows you to move your legs around more. Ready to get started? Don’t give up your structured workouts, but incorporate more exercise into your day too!
References:
· MDLinx.com. “Stair-climbing exercise ‘snacks’ boost health”
· Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. 49(2):298–307, FEB 2017
· JustStand.org. “The Facts”
Related Articles By Cathe:
Can You Improve Your Fitness Level by Taking the Stairs at Work?
7 Frightening Ways that Sitting Too Much Impacts Your Health