“Take the stairs instead of the elevator” is the most ignored piece of health advice in America, and it is easy to see why. You are late, your bag is heavy, and the elevator doors are already open.
It is still good advice, for reasons that have very little to do with the calorie count. What matters is what happens when you make the same small choice several times a day for a couple of decades.
The arithmetic of a flight of stairs
Climbing stairs at a steady pace costs an adult of about 155 pounds (70 kg) somewhere around 8 to 10 calories a minute, or 35 to 42 kJ. Heavier people burn more, lighter people burn less, and how fast you climb matters as much as how many floors you climb. The MET values these estimates come from are published in the Compendium of Physical Activities (Ainsworth et al., 2011), and even the researchers who compiled them will tell you they are averages, not promises.
With that caveat firmly in place, here is what it looks like in practice.
| What you do | Time | Roughly | Food equivalent |
|---|---|---|---|
| One flight up | 20 seconds | 3 calories (13 kJ) | a bite of toast |
| Ten flights up | 3 to 4 minutes | 30 calories (125 kJ) | a third of a banana |
| Ten flights up and down, three times a day | 10 to 12 minutes | 100 calories (420 kJ) | a small cookie |
| That, every workday, for a year | about 45 hours | roughly 26,000 calories (109,000 kJ) | on paper, around 7 pounds of stored fat |
That last line deserves an asterisk, and we would rather give it to you than let you find out the hard way. Bodies compensate. When you add activity, appetite often rises and incidental movement elsewhere often falls, so the real-world result is usually smaller than the arithmetic suggests (Pontzer et al., 2016). Anyone selling you a stair-climbing plan as a weight loss program is selling you the spreadsheet, not the outcome.
So why bother?
Because the calorie column is the least interesting thing about stairs.
- Climbing gets your heart rate up fast. A few flights is a short burst of genuinely vigorous effort, and short bursts of vigorous activity count toward the federal targets in the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, which no longer require you to move in ten minute blocks for it to matter.
- It loads your legs and hips against gravity, which is the kind of stimulus that keeps muscle and bone from quietly disappearing in your fifties and sixties.
- It is free, it is already in the building, and it requires no gym bag, no membership and no change of clothes.
- It is repeatable. Most exercise plans die because they demand a decision every single time. This one only demands that you walk past a button.
What convenience took from you
Elevators, escalators, cars, drive-thrus, delivery apps, remote controls. Each one removed a small amount of daily movement from ordinary life, and none of it came back. The result is that most American adults do not hit the activity guidelines, and only around a quarter meet both the aerobic and the muscle-strengthening recommendations.
All the movement that used to be built into the day, walking to things, carrying things, climbing things, is what researchers call non-exercise activity thermogenesis. It varies enormously between two people of the same size, and for many people it is a bigger daily number than their workouts (Levine, 2007). Stairs are one of the few places where you can put some of it back without rearranging your life.
Why the small choice sticks when big plans don’t
There is a psychological reason to take the stairs that has nothing to do with calories. A choice you make ten times a week without negotiating with yourself becomes part of how you see yourself, and that turns out to matter more for long-term consistency than motivation does. Motivation is a mood. Habits survive bad moods.
Once you have stopped arguing with yourself about the stairs, the same thing tends to happen to parking farther out, walking to the store, and standing up between meetings. None of those are big decisions. That is exactly why they last.
Making it automatic
- Attach it to a cue you already have. Walking into a building is the cue. Stairs are the default. No deliberation.
- Change the geometry. Stand near the stairwell, not the elevator bank. Where you are standing decides more of this than your willpower does.
- Start absurdly small. One or two floors. If you are winded, that is information, not failure, and it will change within a few weeks.
- Count flights if counting helps you, and stop counting the moment it starts to feel like homework.
When to go easy
Stairs are hard on knees and hips, and coming down is harder on them than going up. If you have joint pain, balance problems, a heart condition or you have been inactive for a long time, use the handrail, take one flight at a time, and talk to your doctor about what is sensible for you. Walking and cycling put much less load on the joints and count just as much.
MedlinePlus keeps a plain-language guide to exercise and physical fitness that is a reasonable place to start if you are coming back from an injury or a long gap.
The honest summary
Taking the stairs will not make you thin. It is worth about a cookie a day, and your body will claw some of that back. What it will do is keep your heart, your legs and your balance in better shape than the elevator will, at a cost of roughly four minutes.
If you want the full picture of what different activities cost, we laid it out in calorie burn by activity. And if you want to understand why the food side does most of the heavy lifting on weight, start with how to burn your kJs.
Sources
- Ainsworth, B. E., et al. (2011). 2011 Compendium of Physical Activities: a second update of codes and MET values. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 43(8), 1575 to 1581.
- US Department of Health and Human Services. Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, 2nd edition.
- Levine, J. A. (2007). Nonexercise activity thermogenesis, liberating the life-force. Journal of Internal Medicine, 262(3), 273 to 287.
- Pontzer, H., et al. (2016). Constrained total energy expenditure and metabolic adaptation to physical activity in adult humans. Current Biology, 26(3), 410 to 417.
- MedlinePlus. Exercise and Physical Fitness. National Library of Medicine.