Stairs

I used to climb stairs regularly to stay in shape, and regularly crossed paths with boxers and extreme endurance athletes like mountaineers and ironmen, so whoever said that you won’t get in shape climbing stairs is wrong. Also, firefighters. They have to climb stairs regularly as a workout as functional fitness and those folks are in incredible shape. You can easily make a stair workout very hard no matter how much time you have to spend. For me, a one-hour workout once or twice a week was plenty, depending on the intensity of the workout I sometimes could only handle once a week at first. Once the body gets used to climbing lots of flights of stairs without stopping then the objectives were to just go faster and farther, so I used interval timers to try to climb x amount more stairs in the same amount of time, and if I didn’t make the time limit I “had to” run the rest of the way as the timer counted down, for example one guy I saw on the stairs could ascend, say, 36 flights of stairs in 4.5 minutes, meaning he could climb the equivalent of a vertical mile’s worth of stairs in around an hour, and I was slower than that, so his time and distance was a goal to work towards, starting with 1/4 or 1/2 of a vertical mile, etc. At my peak fitness I’d spend one workout per week increasing speed and the other workout of the week would be to add weight - I’d put on a backpack with either weights or extra water inside (e.g. 5 gallons of water is around 42 pounds) and sometimes add on ankle weights or heavy boots to keep my ankles strong. Other advice I got from mountaineers was, it’s very hard on your knees to walk down stairs, so lean way back to use your glutes and quads to protect your knees, any kind of activity where your body lowers itself requires twice as much effort, so if your building has an elevator, go down in the elevator about 75% of the time and save your knees.

/r/loseit Thread