Running up and down stairs is useful cardio exercise which provides an increased heart rate and a large amount of calories burned and toned muscles especially in lower body area. Research shows that a man with 150 pounds is able to burn about 1000 calories just in a short period of 1 hour by running up and down the stairs. Such great number of calories reduction eventually helps shedding pounds of weight from every part of the body.
A Perfect Place to Run
For running up the stairs, there should definitely be a good place which can provide you with some basic facilities to perform in a better way to get the maximum benefits. If you have stairs inside your house, that is good but if not, then you can use some other facilities available in your locality such as the stairs of a sports stadium or the stairs of your old school or any other place where you are allowed to use the stairs for running purpose. However, make sure that those stairs have long flights so you don’t have to turn around again and again which might make you feel dizziness.
Running Workout Duration
When you are planning your running down stairs workout, keep in mind that it will not be easy for you to keep running for half an hour or more because you have to work really harder to keep running on the steps of the stairs. If you are simply running on a plane surface of flooring, this is different, but running up and down the stairs is not as easy as it seems to be. You better have a shorter session for this specific exercise or else you will get tired very soon. If you have access to a 10 flights of stairs, you should not have more than 10 rounds of it; however, it all depends upon your overall body fitness. If you have more potential and energy, you can do even more. Also keep a short break of at least 2 minutes between two sets.
3 Important Points to Remember Before You Begin
Though the benefits of running stairs are unlimited, but it is also very important to keep in mind that these benefits cannot be easily gained as you are not using a machine for running at the gym. This might give you an easy opportunity to burn the calories and strengthen the body muscles, but running on real stairs demands from you to be fit enough to perform this real exercise in real atmosphere. Here are some basic steps which you can follow to perform it better;
- Running stadium stairs up and down for about 20 minutes is a good duration for your physical activities which you can increase when you feel better. You can do short spells of 20 minutes every alternative day.
- You should also keep the track of your progress by counting the number of rounds you are taking in a minute.
- You can also add more resistance in your training for which you can wear a weighted vest or hold a ball in your hands or even putting on extra clothes on your body will increase resistance. The more resistance you put; the more fat you can burn and tone and strengthen muscles.
