Workout Benefits of the Stairmaster

The Stairmaster company makes a broad range of fitness products. In 1986, the company launched the StairMaster 4000PT, which simulates real-world stair climbing. Using this exercise machine, a similar product or actual stairs offers you many health benefits. Learning about these benefits can help you make wise choices each day.

Read more: What Does Stair Climbing Do for Your Body?

The obesity epidemic has led to increased interest in exercise equipment designed to help you lose weight. A February 2013 review in Rehabilitation Psychology stated that simply climbing two flights of stairs each day will cause you to lose about 6 pounds a year. That's because climbing stairs burns about 10 calories a minute. The authors noted that climbing stairs lowers your risk of getting lung cancer or having a stroke. It even increases your expected lifespan.

Stairmaster's products can help you reap this benefit of climbing stairs. An article from the Arthritis Foundation offers you some useful tips on using Stairmaster's stair-stepping machines. The author recommends keeping a solid posture and having your abdominal muscles engaged during use.

You easily can meet these criteria by maintaining a light grip on the handrails without leaning on them. The author also encourages you to make slow, steady progress and gradually increase the duration and intensity of your Stairmaster workout.

Read more: What Are the Benefits of Running Stairs?

Many people want to get fit to better enjoy their leisure activities. Climbing stairs can help you reach this goal too. The authors of a February 2017 article in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise tested 31 healthy women and showed that doing just a few minutes of stairs each week increased fitness by about 10 percent in 42 days.

These researchers found positive effects comparable to high-intensity cycling. Yet climbing stairs has the bigger impact on bone mineral density, according to a December 2018 review in BioMed Research International.

Researchers can also use stairs to measure your fitness. An August 2016 paper in the journal Health reports on 29 women and men who were assessed during a 100-stair climb. The results indicated that this simple test provided a reliable indicator of physical fitness.

Interestingly, the overall fitness of firefighters and trainees is often determined using a Stairmaster stepmill. An April 2019 article in the Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology nicely illustrates such use in 13 healthy adults enrolled in firefighting school.

Read more: Leg Weakness and Climbing Stairs

The increased prevalence of obesity means that more people have increased levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. Increases in this health biomarker put you at risk for having a heart attack or stroke. People have thus looked for ways to quickly decrease this type of bad cholesterol. In addition to changing your diet, doing regular exercise like climbing stairs can help you decrease your LDL cholesterol.

An October 2015 paper in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation reports on a clever intervention to document this potent effect. These researchers simply had 67 hospital employees use the stairs instead of taking the elevator each day. Compared to baseline, this intervention caused nearly a 6 percent decrease in the participants' LDL cholesterol. It also increased their aerobic fitness.

Finally, climbing the stairs each day lowered their circulating levels of proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9, PCSK9. Your body uses this biomarker to keep your lipoproteins balanced.