A lot of people, unable to manage their weight, blame it on a lack of time to exercise or then inability to join a gym. Research shows that you don’t need expensive gym equipment to lose weight. Even a simple thing like climbing a staircase can help your weight loss efforts. Korean researchers, along with researchers from Canada, decided to see if a simple exercise intervention like stair-climbing could help overweight and obese young women.
Twenty-six study participants were randomly assigned to either a stair-climbing exercise group or a non-exercising control group. The women were around 25 years old. The stair climbing exercise group performed 20 sessions supervised, numbering five a week over 4 weeks. The sessions consisted of brief intermittent stair climbing exercise consisting of 3-minute warm-ups followed by three bouts of 20 seconds of stair-climbing, interspersed with 2-minute recovery periods. The total exercise duration was 10 minutes per session. Researchers found that all participants showed significant changes in body weight, BMI, waist circumference and cardiorespiratory fitness.
The non-exercise group showed no such benefits.
The study, published in the ‘Journal of Obesity & Metabolic Syndrome’, says that short bouts of vigorous stair-climbing are a feasible and time-efficient exercise to improve cardiorespiratory fitness and weight parameters in previously sedentary, obese young women.