Want to burn calories? Climbing stairs might be the most effective exercise for you

I go up and down stairs daily, usual avoid escalators you see. However there will be many who need to use escalators or lifts like my dad who is aged. For a couple of months after my bike accident I found ascending stairs very painful and avoided.

I use our house stairs for daily exercise.

“To move 1 kilogram of body mass over 1 horizontal meter, you expend 0.5 calories,” he said. “If you move 1 kilogram of body mass vertically on stairs it’s 10 calories. So it’s 20 times the calories moving vertically rather than horizontally.”

Help me out here: So, if I weigh 100 kgs and walk one meter up a flight of stairs, I use 1000 calories?

If you're trying to lose weight and want a new way to do it, stair-climbing as a regular exercise — or just adding a few flights a day — might be for you.

It's a load of rubbish anyway:

"The exercise paradox, also known as the workout paradox, refers to the finding that physical activity, while essential for maintaining overall health, does not necessarily lead to significant weight loss or increased calorie expenditure. This paradox challenges the common belief that more exercise equates to more calories burned and consequently, more weight loss."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_paradox#:~:text=The exercise paradox%2C also known,loss or increased calorie expenditure.

Weight loss is 80% diet 20% exercise. I say that as someone who has been dedicated to both my whole life.

It’s almost impossible to out exercise a bad diet.

Yes. Don't forget that just about everything people colloquially call "calories" is actually kilocalories.

Good point. Does that change anything?

I wrestle, get my entire body and all my muscles working, hands, legs, fingers, hips (especially) balance all combined.

The magnitude, and maybe your perception. In your example, you used 1000 calories, that's 1kcal of the daily 2000kcal or so for an average adult.

There it is. Silly me. Thanks. I was beginning to think we'd solved the obesity epidemic. Have everyone walk up and down one flight of stairs every day, and hey presto! The good doctor should probably clarify, for idiots like me.

When I go to the sports center I always find it funny to see people take the elevator to go up to the gym, and then..... use the stepping machines.

Going up and down ladders ("stairs" on ships) wearing steel-toed boots does wonders. Empty calories certainly don't help.

Yuri Yoshizumi won last year's women's division of the Stairclimbing World Championships in her native Osaka, Japan, a 285-meter (935 feet) climb — 1,610 stairs — that she finished in 10 minutes, 20.06 seconds.

We have a mountain trail directly behind our house which my Garmin says is coincidentally the same height. My fastest time, years ago when I used to cycle all the time and fit into trousers I don't any more, was about 23 minutes.

Garmin reckons me shifting 65kg up 285m and back on this trail, a 4.7km round trip, is 520 kcal. So the calculation in the story is probably wrong. 500 calories is only two regular size beers.

Ascent speed, sometimes referred to as "VAM", is a good measure of physical fitness/endurance. As a basic guide, you need 1750m an hour to be a contender for the Tour de France. They're as fit as anybody.

Yoshizumi san here is knocking out 1654 VAM, which is also extremely fast, even if just for ten minutes. Her fitness, as measured by VO2 max or whatever, will be massive.

If you're trying to lose weight and want a new way to do it, stair-climbing as a regular exercise

A new way? Really?