Tuesday’s Tip|Skip the Elevator|Hit the Stairs

Whenever I get the chance I take the stairs. My wife thinks it is some odd quirk of my personality. While that might have some truth it is also part of my desire to find ways to stay fit in the midst of life. So I always skip the elevator and hit the stairs and get a little cardio-kick at the same time.

There are three areas of life where this mindset fits the most: work and travel, and exercise.

Stairs at Work

Remember the importance of getting out of the Office Chair during the day? I recommend finding the stairs during breaks. The breaks aren’t enough to start me to sweat; these micro-cardio-breaks are just that, kicks to the cardio system. These are little episodes that kick my system out of park from sitting and into action. They get the system flowing. The result is that I feel more alert and engaged.

My workplace has two buildings with four floors – a perfect place to uncover cardio-breaks between meetings. I take a few extra minutes between meetings to allow me time to hit the stairs. I choose a path that lets me go up and down at least one flight of steps.

Okay so with a little thinking I can get to the stairs, now add some variety. I vary how I go up and down the stairs. Each forces my body to work differently. Here suggestions:

• Hit-Em-All by quickly moving your feet touching every step going up or down.
• Sprint Up taking two steps at a time
• Bound Down taking two steps at a time going down.
• Long Lunge slowly take three steps at a time going up. Variations include:
• Straight lunge – keep your strides in line.
• Skate Lunge – when stepping with your left foot reach as far left as you can, the reach to the right when stepping with your right foot. Just like skating.
• Cross-over lunge – step across, so step to the right when using your left foot and vise versa.

Here is my favorite route at work that give me about a ten minute cardio break that doesn’t depend on the weather. It takes me less than 10 minutes until I’m back at my desk ready to think through my next challenge.

1. Sprint-Up – climb one set of stair in the the building from ground floor to the 4th floor. I take two steps at a time and jump-start my body into moving.
2. Walk – our offices have two main buildings that each have stairways on either end. This give me a walking break by going from one set of stairs to the other.
3. Hit-em-All – take the other flight of stairs all the way back down to ground floor.
4. Walk – recover by walking to the other building and the next set of stairs.
6. Long Lunge – Trying different variations I slowly make my way back up to the 4th floor by taking 3 steps at a time. This really gets the legs working.
7. Walk – recover again on the 4th floor as I make my way to the other set of stairs.
8. Hit-Em-All – again hit every step as I make my way back down to ground floor.
9. Walk – recover as I slowly make my way back to my cube. This recovery give me time to refocus my thoughts on my work. By the time I get back I’m definitely ready to focus.

Let me know your ideas for hitting the stairs at work.

Stairs while Traveling

When traveling I have a simple, but odd request when I choose a hotel room – “as high as you can go, with a view”.

That request starts to make more sense as you’ve been reading this post, but I often get some odd looks when I request it. Still that opportunity to skip the elevator and hit the stairs is just too great to pass up.

My last business trip was to Arizona for the Co-Development and Open Innovation Conference that was held at the Talking Stick Resort. Although I was only able to get a room on the fifth floor I was able to use all fourteen floors while on my trip.

After getting settled in the room I went searching for the stairs; often hotels end up hiding them and the Talking Stick Resort was no different. I used the stairs every time I went too, or from, my room.

The other thing I discovered that I found was that the exercise room was on the top floor. It made me wonder how many people rode the elevator up, bypassing the steps, to arrive at the fitness center and spend hours on a step machine. Not me…

I took the stairs and it provided my warm-up, then took the stairs back down as my cool off after working out. It was perfect.

So watch for stairs that you can build into your life when you travel. Like me, you’ll find it is much easier to build in a little more exercise into your busy travel schedule by just hitting the stairs.

Stairs for Exercise

Growing up I played hockey and had several coaches that loved to have us find stairs for punishment, I mean training. Those workouts were tough and made me learn to respect the training that can be done on stairs.

Those memories came back as I read through Stair Mastery from Experience Life Magazine. In the article Andrew Heffernan gives excellent workout ideas for using stairs to give the ultimate strength and cardio workout anywhere.

I will say the article left me longing … longing to have some long stairways near my home. (Okay, I know I do live in Colorado Springs and have done The Incline, but that’s a wonderful topic for another post.)

In the article Andrew shares wonderful wisdom from Virgil Aponte, who has earned the title of “Stair Guru”. One quote stuck out to me …

“I’ve found that stair climbing actually has some advantages over running,” says Aponte. “It’s more challenging because you’re lifting your body weight against gravity. But it’s also lower impact because your weight doesn’t come crashing down onto your front foot with each step as it does when you run. You just lift up your foot and the stair is there, at the top point in your stride.”

Excellent point that using stairs is lower impact and requires us to lift our own body weight, but that’s only on the climb. Going down is a different game. I’m curious what Virgil Aponte would say about descending.

Either way that article ends with a series of pretty serious stair workouts. It is worth reading.

Hopefully, it will convince you to join me in skipping the elevator and hitting the stairs.