Fact checked by Nick Blackmer
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- Stair climbing works multiple lower-body muscles and engages the core to maintain stability.
- It provides high-intensity cardio with lower joint impact than running.
- Regular use can improve heart health, boost fitness, and burn calories efficiently in less time.
The stair climber—the machine that looks like an endless escalator you keep ascending—is a popular option at the gym for a good cardio workout. But, how effective is it, really? And what are the benefits of adding the stair climber (sometimes also called a stepmill or stairmill) to your workout?
1. Stair Climbing Gets Lots of Muscles Working
A stair climber lights your entire lower half on fire. When you go upstairs, every lower-body muscle is recruited. These include your quads, hamstrings, glutes, hip abductors, and calves.
Your core muscles are also working, including your rectus abdominis (across the front of your abdomen), obliques (sides of your abdomen), and transverse abdominis (deep muscles that wrap around the sides of your abdomen). These have to fire up to keep you steady as you climb.
2. It’s a Low-Impact (But High-Intensity) Workout
Research analyzing the heart rates (HR) of exercisers on 10 popular cardio machines found that the stair climber and treadmill spiked HR the most.
Using a treadmill and a stair climber can both be high-intensity cardio options. But for many people, a treadmill may not be the best (or safest) option. When jogging or running, both feet leave the ground simultaneously, resulting in a more forceful landing. This high impact can place significant stress on your joints, particularly if you have pre-existing hip, knee, or ankle issues.
With a stair climber, however, each step is controlled, so there is less impact than with jogging or running. Less pounding makes it more joint-friendly.
3. Stair Climbing Boosts Your Cardio Fitness
Continuous stair climbing activates a lot of big muscles, and the work to keep them moving provides a challenge to your heart and lungs. If you do this regularly, those organs adapt, get stronger, and become more efficient at using oxygen, which can boost your fitness.
In fact, women who added stair climbing to their routine for eight weeks increased their VO2 max, the gold standard for measuring cardiorespiratory fitness. They lost weight and improved their cholesterol profiles, too. A higher VO2 max has been linked to healthier hearts and longer lives.
4. It's A Time-Efficient Calorie-Burn
A stair climber can help you burn more calories in a shorter time. A study analyzed how long it took participants to burn 300 calories on several gym machines and found that a stair climber got them to burn those calories faster than on an elliptical, bike, arc trainer, rower, and other machines.
So if your goal is to burn calories, climbing stairs can help you achieve it faster.
However, compared to other steady-state cardio options, here’s how a stair climber stacks up for a 150-pound person:
- Stair climber: Burns about 660 calories per hour
- Running (8-minute mile pace): Burns about 842 calories per hour
- Jogging (12-minute mile pace): Burns about 607 calories per hour
- Walking (17-minute mile pace): Burns about 343 calories per hour
5. It’s Simple to Structure a Workout
By adjusting the intensity on your stair climber, you can change how hard you work, which can help you structure a workout. For instance, if you want to do high-intensity interval training, or HIIT, you can crank up the intensity for a short period—say, 30 seconds or one minute—and then back off to a lower intensity for your recovery period. Generally, consider keeping your work-to-rest ratio at 1:2 or 1:3. So if you do 30 seconds hard, you would go easy for 60 seconds or 90 seconds, before repeating.
You can also keep it steady-state. Just choose a more moderate intensity level that will allow you to maintain the same effort for your chosen duration.
Is It Better Than Walking?
If you’re looking for the better bang for your buck, stair climbing, as a higher-intensity activity, is going to have the edge over walking, which is a moderate-intensity activity. This means you reap the health benefits of exercise in less time.
However, ultimately, the best exercise is one you’ll actually want to do. If you love walking and are consistent with it, that’s going to be better for your health than stair-climbing workouts that you dread—and consequently skip or put off.
Potential Mistakes to Watch Out For
If you enjoy stair-climbing workouts and want to do them more, learning proper form is vital. Leaning forward or hunching over the handrails—or grasping them too tightly—can reduce activation in your lower-body muscles. Instead, hold them lightly for balance and try to keep an upright posture, with your chest up, shoulders back, and core engaged.
Because stair climbing is a high-intensity exercise, you also want to make sure you’re not jumping into too much too soon. Start at lower intensity levels so your body can get used to the movement, and keep your workouts brief. Once you get familiar with stair climbing, you can add harder intervals and make your workout longer overall.
