Stair Climbing: Just One of the Reasons Your Wife Will Outlive You

Loyal readers may understand, sadly, that Geezer's primary attraction to climbing stairs for fitness has much to do with the price of equipment. But climbing stairs is not just inexpensive: it's surprisingly good for us. Honest. Just ask Dr. Harvey Simon, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Med School, who writes in the New York Times Consults blog that stair climbing is one of the best-kept secrets in preventive medicine. Simon makes the claim that taking care of a two- or three-story home is one reason American
women outlive their husbands by an average of more than five years. He also cites a Harvard Alumni Study that found that men who average at least eight
flights a day enjoy a 33 percent lower mortality rate than men who are
sedentary. But the heart of Simon's endorsement of stair climbing comes from a Canadian study that monitored 17 healthy
male volunteers with an average age of 64 as they walked on the
level, lifted weights or climbed stairs. Stair climbing, the researchers found, was the most
demanding exercise–twice as taxing as brisk walking on the level and 50
percent harder than walking up a steep incline or lifting weights.
And what about walking down stairs? Simon says that going down does help, mainly because we use different muscles going down than we use going up, but the descent burns less than a third as many calories as the climb. Geezer believes it's not worth discussing: What goes up, must come down.
Read more in Consults.