Take the Stairs!

“some quote about humans being meant to move” – many people in the fitness industry, evolutionary biologists, paleoanthropologists, etc.
 

Exercise is good for you, right?

(If you aren’t in agreement so far, then probably stop reading now. That’s kind of an underlying premise of this whole post.)

The way we view ‘exercise’ in our society is slightly odd. It’s something that’s been allocated a certain place in our lives: there are certain places we’re meant to go for it (to a gym, swimming pool, sports centre, park, the streets; but not inside the office, in train stations, while waiting for the bus); it’s meant to be done in a certain way (jogging, lifting weights) and for a certain purpose (to ‘burn calories’ and look slimmer, or to gain muscle and look ‘hench’ or ‘more toned’). [This is just meant to be the general voice of society, the cultural norm, and speak only for the most part, not for the entirety of what people think]. It’s also a bit of a simplification and is probably missing a lot, but this post isn’t meant to delve into that too deeply. Exercise isn’t something that we do for fun (the rest of the people who might be better of being healthy view this with a bit of disdain), though there is a blurry bit around sport and exercise.

Our body doesn’t really recognise this ‘exercise’ thing. It isn’t turned off while we’re sat around all day, then to suddenly realise “Oh, I’ve just changed into running shorts and put on some trainers, I’d better get fired up!”. Our body is working the whole time, just to varying intensities. Instead of a binary exercise/not exercise it’s more a continuum of movement. Sat still for awhile on a chair, you aren’t moving much (but still breathing, heart beating, shuffling around, scratching your face), but when you stand up to go and fetch some crisps from the kitchen, your body works a bit harder. Can your body tell the difference between going for a jog and running for the bus? Not really.

I listened to a podcast recently (Kelly Starret, London Real, comes well recommended) which said that there’s a lot of research being done at the moment which suggests that one of the key deciders of how ‘healthy’ we are is what is termed the ‘base activity rate’. It isn’t so much whether you do your three periods of twenty minutes exercise per week but rather what you spend most of your time doing – which makes sense, if ‘exercise’ only makes up ten percent of your movement (what your body is doing) then the other ninety percent is probably quite important. In this podcast Kelly says that having a sedentary lifestyle is comparable to smoking in how bad it is for your body.

One of my favourite quotes on this is from Ido Portal (this video): “Humans are great at adapting. If you start doing something, your body will adapt to be better at doing it. If you stop doing something, your body will adapt to be better at not doing it.”. If you don’t use your joints and muscles fully, you will lose the ability to use them fully. Young children are able to squat down on the floor – a position which ought be a human resting position, allowing is to catch our breath, as well as being the same movement pattern as jumping (so if you can’t do it, your body can’t jump to the best of it’s ability and might damage itself if you try) and a functional movement for if you need to pick something up off the floor, pack your bag, use a locker, sweep the floor, etc. But most adults (and even teenagers) can’t do this, showing that they have lost some of the mobility of their ankle or hip. It’s use it or lose it, and spending most of our day sat in chairs with our hips locked in place and not using our ankles much means that we lose much of what we had.

So being ‘healthy’ in this modern lifestyle is largely about trying to increase the average amount we’re moving, trying to add in lots of changes throughout the day. Some of this is pretty standard stuff, like to try and walk or cycle instead of driving or taking the train/bus/tube/etc. But this also works for the all the different parts of our body: walking is physically not very challenging for most of us, placing one leg in front or the other in a very easy way, so all it does it increase our energy expenditure slightly and increase our heart rate and breathing. So we need variety too. My ideal office – or actually, anywhere that people spend time – would include a bar or some rings and a wooden stick and a ball and a soft floor, as well as a desk which can be adjusted that I could use it stood up, seated (on an exercise ball or a stool or something that makes it harder to slump and slouch), or maybe even lying down. Throughout the day I could then do short bursts of different movements (hanging from the rings, stretching on the floor, dancing around, holding a weight), just for a couple of minutes each hour while on the phone or in a conversation or thinking about something so that my body actually gets some use. It would be nice to have this sort of thing at train stations (or even on trains) and similar, something I notice when I’m travelling (longer distances by train) is that I don’t feel good after spending lots of time sat around in trains, so it would be nice to have somewhere I could do something different (though admittedly it’s relatively common for me to go to a quieter part of the station and do some yoga/stretching/climbing/lie down/parkour for a bit).

This is where stairs come in. I was at a hospital a couple of months ago and after reporting into reception I was told to “take the lift to the fourth floor”. Take the lift?! What society are we in where suddenly people are actually told not to use our bodies? The receptionist didn’t tell me to go to the fourth floor and leave it up to me to use the lift (most people would probably take the lift), she actually told me to take the sedentary option. Sure, it isn’t like she’d actually thought about it and didn’t mean that I ought not take the stairs, but it’s probablly equally as bad that this sort of behaviour and language has crept in subconsciously to our culture: at least is she had said it intentionally (“oh by the way, there is a lift incase you don’t want to use the stairs”) you might think about it more instead of just sheepishly accepting what you’re told.

I’ve made it a rule that I always take the stairs. Train stations often have escalators, lifts, travelators, etc, but I avoid them. This is best when I’m travelling through London and I come across tube stations where I have to take fifty steps or more – at most, one hundred and seventy – instead of taking escalators. Sometimes there is no option of stairs, in which case I take the escalator and walk as well. There are physical benefits to this (coming shortly), but also on principle, I’m not lazy and incapable of getting myself and whatever I have with me from one place to another. Exceptions to this rule are if I a) am in a rush and might miss a train, b) if I have a better reason to take the ecalator, such as the fact that I might stretch my calves on the corner of it, c) if I’m injured or old and crippled and can’t walk so easily.

Stand there and do nothing? Or add some movement variety to your daily life?

As you’ll notice once you’ve gone up fifty steps, your heart is beating more quickly and you’re breathing more. It’s a bit like doing a bit of interval training, a short burst of more intense exercise (which is probably more beneficial than doing endurance training). But you are also using your legs more, especially if you take two or three steps at a time: your legs are pushing more weight, so the muscles will get worked a bit (if you want to be ‘toned’, this is exactly the sort of thing you should be doing), especially the load bearing around your knee joint to keep that strong by pushing all of your weight up by bending the knee; your ankles when reaching to the step above you will be more flexed than when walking on flat ground, and you’ll be pushing off with your foot more bent the other way behind you, so that helps to keep them mobile. It’s almost like doing part of a workout, except that this is just part of day-to-day life. And this is how it should be!

Our human ancestors didn’t spend most of their lives sat at desks. They spent most of it moving. And while in many, many ways our life is better than theirs was (resource security, accommodation, much more free time by not having to forage or hunt for hours, etc), it’s certainly the case that they were much better at moving than we are nowadays. We must recognise that our current society is not the one that is optimised for our bodies, otherwise we will turn into a race of stunted, shuffling creatures who can’t even walk properly but instead penguin-walk side to side with a stooped back, requiring the aid of a walking frame to get from around.

Update: I’ve since come across a term to explain this thinking better: domain dependence. Credit to Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragility. His example is of a businessman who goes to the gym to work out, but then has a porter carry his suitcase up the stairs. Domain dependence is when we put ideas in categories – so here, we know that exercise is good for us, but limit that to certain times and locations in our life. Go to the gym, use the cross-stepper, but not taking the stairs!