It is more useful to go down the stairs than to go up

0

It is much more beneficial for health to go down the stairs than to go up. Although, at first glance, it seems somewhat strange.

There are a lot of ways to stay fit besides going to the gym regularly. For example, you can get off the bus 2 km to work and cover that distance on foot. Another great exercise is stair walking. And it seems to many people that it is the rise in this process that brings the maximum benefit. In fact, to strengthen sports performance, it is more important to go down than to go up, as recent experiments by scientists from Edith Cowan University in Australia have shown.

They asked 30 overweight women over the age of 60 to walk stairs for 12 weeks. Half of them had to take the elevator to the sixth floor and then go down the stairs, but the other half was less lucky – they had to climb the stairs to the same sixth floor. These exercises were initially performed twice a week, but were more intense.

One would expect that it was the women in the stair-climbing group who would benefit most because they were more fatigued. But it turned out that those who went down had the most noticeable weight loss, and a decrease in blood pressure, blood fats and sugar levels. They also achieved improvements in coordination of movements and bone strength.

Why did this happen? The bones have become stronger, since when going down the stairs we put our feet on each step with much more force than when going up. Also, going down stairs uses more powerful muscle fibers and we put more damage on them, which makes them stronger. It also stimulates hormonal reactions, which leads to weight loss, burning of calories, as well as improvement of all other indicators.