Up the stairs to fat loss

Great Workout, Forget the View

By LIZ ROBBINS

EIGHTEEN years ago, Ronnie Guie considered buying a treadmill or a stair-climbing machine to stay in shape. Then one day on his lunch hour at Con Edison in Astoria, Queens, two co-workers invited Mr. Guie to take a walk to the top of the 10-floor building. He was breathing heavily by the time he got there, but was hooked: he had found his workout for free.

“For me, it’s a quick fix,” he said.

At 59, Mr. Guie says he still has the same waist size (30 inches) and weight range (150 to 155 pounds) that he did when he was 17, thanks to his five-day-a-week regimen. He climbs the concrete stairs usually 10 times or so in an hour, depending how much time he has. “I get the results out of it — and it’s not easy,” he said. “But I always feel great.”

Stairs are everywhere, of course, but they are rarely embraced as an option for getting into shape. They wait in the stale air wells of high-rises (especially in dense urban centers like New York City), or on stationary machines in the corners of health clubs now inundated by the more popular, but less strenuous, elliptical machines. Many stairwells aren’t even accessible, often because of post-9/11 security concerns. But when they are, or are opened especially for runners going up, they provide a workout that returns maximum value in minimum time, with low impact. And going up is much better for your knees than going down.

“Stair climbing will give you a little more bang for your buck because of the vertical component,” said Cedric Bryant, chief science officer for the American Council onExercise. Compared to jogging or cycling at a moderate pace without much of an incline, stair climbing, Dr. Bryant said, “will be a bit more challenging and therefore allow you to burn more calories for that same amount of time.”

Once a year, Mr. Guie goes for the ultimate burn. On Feb. 3, he and 318 other climbers competed in the 32nd annual Empire State Building Run-Up, racing up 86 floors and 1,576 stairs. Taking two at a time, Mr. Guie reached the observation deck in 19 minutes 34 seconds. The winner of the invitational race, Thomas Dold, 24, of Germany, finished in 10:07.

The New York Road Runners organizes the invitation-only event to satisfy stir-crazy runners seeking to vary their winter workout on the one day the Empire State Building stairwell is open to foot traffic. A gimmick, perhaps, but also part of an extreme sport trend.

Tower running events, many of which benefit charities, are held in world skyscrapers, from Taipei, Taiwan, to Milan, that open stairwells just for the occasion. This weekend, races will be held in Chicago (“Hustle up the Hancock”) and Las Vegas (“Scale the Strat”), Denver, Des Moines, Grand Rapids, Mich., Omaha and Philadelphia.

“I find it a good cross-training event because it gets the heart and lungs pumping fairly hard,” said Andrew Femia, a New York triathlete who competes with his wife, Jeanette Baer, every other week in one running race or another.

“It’s 14 minutes of pain,” Mr. Femia, 35, said before the Run-Up. Or worse: he finished in 16:49, Ms. Baer in 21:33.

The couple trained by climbing the 13 floors to the top of their Manhattan building and then taking the elevator down — repeating 12 times.

Mr. Femia, a lawyer, said he tried to train in his 54-floor office building in lower Manhattan, but ran into a common obstacle in post-9/11 Manhattan office buildings: some stairwells are inaccessible except in an emergency.

Mr. Femia wrote two letters requesting permission, even offering to waive the building’s liability, but was told stair running was “completely impermissible.”

(A New York Department of State spokesman said no uniform state building code existed to close stairwells, but added that companies make independent decisions based on security.)

Debbie Blankfort and Suzanne Iovino, real estate agents, trained in the 21-story Blue Hill Plaza, Rockland County’s tallest building. Ben Oliner, 27, received permission to run the 22 floors of the Yale Club in Midtown because he teaches squash there.

As the No. 5-ranked United States squash player, Mr. Oliner said the exercise helped him develop strength in his gluteus, quadriceps and calf muscles, which he uses on court lunging and backpedaling for the ball. He won the preliminary division of the Run-Up in 13:15.

Dr. Bryant said that walking up stairs at a moderate intensity should burn 5 calories a minute for a 120-pound person, 7 for a 150-pound person, and 9 for a 180-pound person. Running stairs multiplies the caloric burn and the cardiovascular benefit.

Steven Loy, professor of kinesiology at California State University, Northridge, and a consultant for StairMaster in 1993, said stair climbing could appeal to those who were not competitive. “For people who are overweight and not as well conditioned, they may not be able to run, but they could climb stairs,” Mr. Loy said.

The impact on knees and feet is relatively low, with the pressure equivalent to two times one’s body weight walking up stairs (compared with three to four times when running), Dr. Bryant said. The pounding on the body going downstairs, however, equals six or seven times one’s body weight, he cautioned.

Sheri Harkness, 40, of East Stroudsburg, Pa., took the stairs to jump-start her final chapter in a dramatic weight-loss story. Weighing 282 pounds in 2007, Ms. Harkness devoted herself to a fitness routine and cut her food intake by half. She started working out on a treadmill (at first only able to go 3.1 miles an hour for 15 minutes) and worked up to an hour on the elliptical machine as she lost half her body weight.

Until three months ago, though, she had stayed away from the StairMaster. “I had always seen it in the gym as a little devil,” Ms. Harkness said.

She decided to tackle it to “shock off” the final 40 pounds she wanted to lose. She augmented stair workouts by running the stadium at East Stroudsburg University, and now weighs 140 pounds, with a goal of 15 more pounds in her sights. She ran up the Empire State Building in 23:10 last week — but thought the StairMaster remained the hardest exercise she’s ever done.

Mr. Loy described some drawbacks to tower running. “The lactic acid production is high,” he said. “And the higher you go, the worse you feel.”

“Personally,” he added, “It doesn’t appeal.”

Ronnie Guie has heard that before when recruiting others to take the stairs for a workout. “Believe me, I have tried,” he said. “They don’t have the discipline.”