Stair Climbing

Research summary

• Stair climbing has been studied as a specific, everyday form of vigorous physical activity across several independent cohorts spanning different countries, with a consistent, though modest and largely observational, direction of benefit.
• In the UK Biobank, adults who reported climbing more flights of stairs per day had lower all-cause, cancer, and cardiovascular mortality than non-climbers, an association that held after adjusting for other physical activity and using negative-control outcome analyses to probe residual confounding; a separate UK Biobank analysis of nearly 460,000 adults found stair-climbing intensity was inversely associated with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, including among people with elevated genetic or clinical risk.
• Japan's Suita Study, a smaller but independent cohort, found more frequent stair climbing was associated with lower incidence of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, fewer cardiovascular risk factors, and lower incident atrial fibrillation, and a US cohort of adults with or at risk of knee osteoarthritis found those who had difficulty climbing stairs had substantially higher mortality.
• The one controlled experiment in this set showed brief, intense stair-climbing intervals performed three times a week for six weeks raised cardiorespiratory fitness by about 12% in previously sedentary women, suggesting a plausible causal mechanism behind the cohort associations.
• Still, because most of this evidence is self-reported and observational, and because people who are already healthier are more likely to climb stairs briskly and often, causality for the mortality findings specifically cannot be established; the consistency across countries and outcomes nonetheless makes stair climbing a plausible, low-cost complement to other physical activity.