Wednesday, August 26, 2026 | Edition 192 | Item #1

It might save your life, according to a new study from researchers at the University of East Anglia and the Norwalk and Norfolk University Hospital. Researchers reviewed 1900 studies from around the world, before identifying nine high-quality studies encompassing 480,000 people and more than 14 years of data. Based on this review, the researchers found that climbing stairs reduced the risk of cardiovascular disease.

The finding that climbing stairs helps your heart isn’t exactly stop the presses stuff, assuming that anyone still has presses. But we found two things particularly interesting about the study. First, the differences were large: regular stair climbers were 39% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and 24% less likely to die from any cause than people who rarely took the stairs. They also had lower risks of heart attack, stroke, and heart failure.

And here’s the good news. You don’t have to run up the Empire State Building, or Taipei 101, or even the Eiffel Tower to get the benefit of climbing stairs. The researchers concluded that spending just a few minutes climbing stairs several times each week can improve cardiorespiratory fitness and reduce cholesterol levels. One large cohort study included in the analysis indicated that climbing about six flights of stairs each day might provide optimal benefit. That’s just 42 flights of stairs, less than half as many as people climb in the annual Empire State Building Run-Up – and you have a full seven days to do it rather than the 9 minutes and 33 seconds that it took for Paul Crake to climb the Empire State Building in 2003.