Stair walking for weight loss. Technique and advice from a trainer

Walking is a simple and accessible to everyone exercise that positively affects our health. But today we will talk about such a type of exercise as walking on stairs. Let’s discuss how to do it correctly, how often you can exercise and how much you need to walk to lose weight.

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“It’s no secret that the norm of physical activity of a person is 10 thousand steps a day. But what to do if you want to add dynamics, emotions and challenges? Below we told you how you can diversify seemingly boring physical activity and make it exciting”.

Walking up stairs is a great way to diversify monotonous walks and make them more challenging. After all, going upstairs will take a lot more energy than a normal walk.

Put on your headphones and climb the stairs of your house from the first floor as far as you can. The height of the house doesn’t matter, because sometimes it can be difficult to get up to the fifth floor. Walking up the stairs is a great endurance workout. Such training can well be called interval training, where the ascent is a strong, heavy part, when you need to tense up, and the descent – a period of recovery and respite.

Benefits of stair walking

For half an hour of such a load you will sweat through, and calories spent twice as much as in a normal walk for the same time. Plus, stair walking trains your respiratory and cardiovascular systems, as well as your CNS.

You’ll activate a lot of muscles because your lower body muscles will be working. If you take such workouts as a habit, over time your legs will become slim, trim and relief, and your buttocks will be round.

Proper walking technique

Ekaterina Kravchenko: To make the exercise more effective, try to push yourself out with the front standing leg, and not by inertia to rise at the expense of the back standing. In this way, the load will be distributed on the buttocks and the back surface of the thigh”.

Try to tilt the body slightly forward, and pull the pelvis back, thus eliminating the load on the knee of the back leg. Keep your back straight, don’t hunch over. Choose the pace based on your fitness. But if you prefer to walk slowly, try at least sometimes to make jerks, accelerations, so that the body gets the necessary load.

Organization of the training process

If you want to pump up your arms in parallel with your legs, you can take dumbbells with you. They will add load and help you spend more calories. And if you feel that your legs are not getting enough load, add lunges or squats, it will make it much harder to climb up.

On the stairs you can do interval training. Let’s say you run upstairs for 10 seconds, and then 15 seconds you calmly climb or walk across the stairs.

You can train even every day, walking at a relaxed pace for 15-20 minutes. The most important thing is to have time to recover, it’s all individual. Someone will need a day, someone – two or three. Try to objectively assess your readiness. Do not exercise to exhaustion, because so you can get fatigue, especially when you are not used to it.

Who should not take the stairs for a long time?

If you have injuries to the back, spine or legs, for example, damage to the ankle, hip, knee joints, you should not exercise. Also, such a load is not recommended for those who have problems with blood pressure. If you doubt whether you can exercise on the stairs, consult a doctor.

Before training, you can slightly stretch your legs with a couple of simple exercises. But afterwards, stretch well. Especially if the load was shocking and you feel that your legs are very tense.