Stairway Workouts – the perfect endurance supplement
Stairway workouts are the perfect supplement for run-heavy training regime. When it comes down to improving athletic performance, we often think about enhancing our training to maximize speed, power, and strength. Climbing stairs is shown to improve running-based endurance performance by enhancing your running economy – which really indicates that it should also hold a key place in the training of endurance athletes
These workouts use a plyometric motion, which strengthens not only the leg muscles (and the smaller, often-underdeveloped stabilizer muscles), but provides a healthy dose of high-intensity cardio to test your lungs and heart.
Climbing stairs is the ultimate functional fitness test – you teach the body to become more efficient in how it operates. That’s why boxers use running upstairs as a training tool; they’re constantly having to push their lactic threshold with sustained, explosive movements.
If you’re doing a sprint or Olympic distance triathlon chances are that you’re using your lactic system. That lactic system produces ATP without oxygen and is manufactured from the breakdown of glucose to pyruvic acid in the muscle cells.
As your race comes to the final stages you may well find yourself using your final energy system –phosphocreatine, our most quickly expendable source of ATP. We access this first and rely on it for sprints finishes or other explosive movements. It’s the system that give us that burst of energy, that raw power. When you climb stairs, you are tapping into that system first.
Stairway training builds strength and power, increasing the ability of your muscles and joints to react upon landing. It also trains your body to recruit muscle fibres more efficiently, which means you don’t need to work as hard to hit a particular pace. That keeps your energy expenditure lower, so you can go faster longer without fatigue or pick up the pace mid-run without getting as winded.
Stairs, like hills, up the intensity of a running workout. But the intensity of the stairs’ elevation is often harder than a gradual hill, which increases the load. This intensity makes you breathe harder and faster so you can take in more oxygen, which spikes your heart rate.
Exercise scientists at McMaster University in Canada recently put the stairs to the test in a study in a time-efficient strategy to see the benefits to cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF). The set up was two different discipline trials each one only requiring 10 minutes from warm up to cool down and occurring three times a week for six weeks.
In the first trial, subjects either went all-out on the stationary bike for three sessions of 20 seconds each. In the second experiment, subjects attacked either one or two flights of stairs in the same manner, but for three 60-second periods. Both protocols increased peak oxygen uptake, by 12% in the first phase, and by 7% in the second, indicating that brief and intense stair climbing improved cardiovascular fitness in only a 30-minute time commitment each week.
Most of us will know of some outdoor steps so why incorporate them in a work-out session like the example below:
SESSION
Warm up for 10-15 minutes.
- Light jog and run drills, e.g. high knees, butt kicks and strides.
Repeat 6x through:
- Run hard up the stairway for 20 seconds
- Jog back down
- 15 seconds rest
Do 4x100m strides focusing on good run form.
Finish the session with a 20-30-minute aerobic run
