Climbing to New Fitness Levels
There is an old saying, “Work smarter, not harder.” But when it comes to fitness and getting in shape, shouldn’t we work hard? Well, what if you could work harder but for less time and see amazing benefits. Climbing stairs is a fantastic interval training exercise and can firm/tone up several areas of our bodies to transform how we look and feel. Stair climbing can work our bodies twice as hard in half the time compared to walking on a flat surface.
Tone Up
Climbing upstairs for a workout puts a huge focus on your calves, glutes, hamstrings, and quads (so basically every major lower body muscle). Working these muscles can help shape your body to be more fit along with the benefit of burning calories and dropping pounds. Also by climbing the stairs, you engage your abdominal muscles and work your core more than you may even realize.
Elevated Heart Rate
A stair based exercise can do wonders for raising your heart rate to ideal performance levels to shed unwanted weight. When compared to jogging or running, climbing up and down stairs can burn double the number of calories and help increase cardiovascular health due to the lifting of your entire body. The bonus for using stairs to shed weight is the more we weigh when starting the stair workouts, the more our bodies work to lift us each and every step thus burning more calories.
Pairs Well
Stairs are everywhere from your apartment building, your job downtown, and the local park or even in the form of stair climber machines at your home or local gym. A valuable benefit to stair climbing is it is free and can be partnered with many other exercises.
Here are a few examples:
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Climbing your apartment stairs and add a set of crunches and/or pushups at the top of each flight
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Utilize your local high school and use the track and stadium stairs to create stair laps
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Create a circuit workout at your gym by heading to the stair climber for short sessions between lifts
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