Does exercise on a StairMaster actually simulate the exercise of climbing stairs?
When you climb stairs, each time you put a foot forward and straighten your leg, you are lifting the weight of your body vertically against gravity.
On a StairMaster, over a period of many steps, your net altitude gain is zero, so you are not lifting your body. Now, I could see how this might give similar exercise anyway, or maybe not.
If you straighten your leg just as the step is moving down, your body stays vertically stationary. No lifting against gravity there. But if the movement of the steps is syncopated, and perfectly timed with your steps, then the downward moving steps will lower your body when you aren’t straightening your leg, and when you straighten your leg, you lift your body. So your body might have an alternating up-and-down movement, giving you exercise on the ups.
But to do this, the StairMaster has to have a start-and-stop motion, which must be synchronized with your steps. Does it actually do this?
(Feel free to tell me if this is a dumb question. I’ve never used a StairMaster nor any other similar device, and I don’t work out in gyms.)
Similar question: What benefit do you get from running on an inclined treadmill, vs. running on a level treadmill? You aren’t actually running uphill and raising your body against gravity. You’re just running on an inclined treadmill, staying vertically still, with your ankles bent at a different angle. Unless you coordinate your steps to get that alternating up-and-down movement? Does this work?
I’ve never used one, but, I think, where the workout comes is using your muscles to push the ‘stairs’ down. There’s resistance built into them. If they were regular stairs, you’d end up at the top of the machine, if there was no resistance, you’d just fall to the bottom, or your legs would be flopping up and down. It should be similar to riding a bike in a high gear on level ground at a fast speed. Once you get a rhythm going, it’s just a matter of keeping it going. The resistance built into the machine should simulate lifting your own body weight.
As for inclining a treadmill, I’ve never done that either, but I would guess it’s because you have to lift each leg up instead of just moving it forward. Not the same as running up a hill, but different muscles then just running on a flat treadmill.
Then there’s this. Don’t forget, just because you’re not doing any actual ‘work’ in the physics sense of the word, doesn’t mean you’re not doing ‘work’ in the exercise sense of the word.
Try telling that to the guy that just benched 200# 5 times and then put the weights back where he found them.
I did the inclined treadmill thing once, during a cardiac stress test. At several points during the test, the treadmill suddenly inclines a little steeper and speeds up. So it gets progressively harder, but it’s not obvious how much effect the steeper incline has. Just speeding up, by itself, makes it plenty enough harder.
In my experience, no, a StairMaster is not like real stairs. It’s like vigorously walking in place. The steps moved down at the same speed I moved my feet, so I was never lifting myself up against gravity. I also was not exerting any force to push the steps down.
Also, I could use a StairMaster for half and hour without being very tired. I could not walk up stairs for that long.
On an inclined treadmill you really are moving up hill. Same as you do walking up the down escalator. If you don’t walk then you end up at the bottom of the treadmill, to get further along or to maintain your position on the treadmill you need to move your body up relative to the treadmill. The treadmill is constantly taking you down and it costs you energy to keep yourself up.
I don’t see the sense in this. If your footsteps are synchronized just right with the treadmill, so that you are staying at a constant altitude relative to earth, you aren’t moving your body up against gravity. The only energy you are using is roughly equivalent to just walking on level ground, as Postariti suggests just above.
But suppose you synchronize your steps, in such a way that in between each step you go down a little, and then with each step you go up a little. Over the longer period, your net altitude remains constant, but each step up is exercise against gravity.
I’m trying to imagine how this would work, though, for a StairMaster type of device.
Also, I don’t see the sense in the suggestion, above, that you are “pushing down” on the step (other than in the classic Newtonian sense that you are pushing down to push yourself up). If the step or treadmill just sinks under your foot as you straighten your leg, there’s no contra-gravity exercise there.
I’m actually wondering if the StairMaster has a complicated (perhaps mechanical or perhaps computer-controlled) mechanism that senses the user’s footsteps and synchronizes its movements properly with the user’s footsteps to make this work.
No. In order to hold yourself at the same altitude you are “fighting” against the treadmill that is trying to take you down. It is not just a matter of moving your legs while your body stays stationary. I don’t have a comment on the stair master because they don’t seem to be a simple platform that is moving.
Yep.
If a sloped treadmill does not accelerate you down, then a flat treadmill does not accelerate you backwards (and it wouldn’t matter how fast the treadmill moves because you are just basically hopping on the spot). But of course this is not the case, and just as your forward velocity must counter the treadmill’s, so must your upward velocity.
Have I managed to be right about a physics question?
Richard Pearse has it right. If you are walking on a flat surface, you are moving forward with each step. On a treadmill, your relative position does not change only because the ‘ground’ is moving backwards underneath of you.
The StairMaster is a similar concept in that it is essentially a 3 step down escalator that your are going up. Go to your local mall & try to go up the down escalator; if you are going at the speed of the escalator, your relative position will not change; however, if you stop, you will go ‘backward’ as you are facing up but going down.
To answer the OP’s question, it is similar but not identical. StairMaster’s have a large rise (step height), either 16 or 17 / floor, where a real building has anywhere from 18-23 for a typical floor, so you are doing less but larger steps. The algorithm is a bit generous, meaning in x minutes I can climb more stories according to the StairMaster’s counter than I can if doing real stairs.
Also, I see many people on this machine leaning their arms on the handrails. Since the machine is supporting their upper body, they are not ‘lifting’ all of their weight against gravity with each step. You can’t ‘cheat’ like this in real stairs.
The StairMaster has 20 speed settings, from “Zombies move much faster” to “Usain Bolt can’t keep up”; my guess is that you were on one of the lower settings.
I agree with this. I used to go on the Stairmaster at the gym all the time and barely broke a sweat. The first time I climbed the CN Tower stairs I thought I was gonna die.
There is a machine that better mimics stairs - it’s called a Stepmill I believe. It looks like a little stand-alone escalator. The risers are way bigger and it takes a lot of effort.
Would it be harder to walk on an inclined treadmill if you were holding 25 pound weights in each hand? It would be harder to walk up a hill with the extra 50 pounds, I think we can all agree on that. But if it’s no harder, then it’s just about the extra leg workout, if it is harder, then it’s more akin to walking up a hill.
This is assuming you body stays in basically the same place and you’re not running up to the top of the machine and falling back to the bottom every few seconds. That would be different.
That happens when the treadmill is flat as well, you just go backwards instead of down.
Yes, you were exerting force to push the pedals down. The force you exerted was equal to your body weight (unless you were cheating by pushing downward on the handrails, which reduces the amount of your weight borne by the pedals). The mechanical work you did with each step was equal to your weight multiplied by the distance that the pedal moved down; this is equal to the mechanical work you do when you walk up one real step.
Since the machine can’t adjust the amount of force involved - that’s determined purely by your weight - it can only adjust the speed at which the pedal is allowed to move downward under the influence of your weight. Move to “maximum intensity,” and you’ll see that the pedals are allowed to move downward very quickly; this will be equivalent to running up a set of real stairs. Same deal: force is determined by your weight, and the speed at which you run up the staircase determines your mechancal power output (and therefore your aerobic effort).
Next time you’re on a Stairmaster, get a camping backpack and fill it with 100 pounds of bricks (or just have a 100-pound kid ride piggyback). You’ll realize as soon as you get on the machine that the force is indeed determined by “your” weight (here, “your” means your body weight plus the weight of the bricks). Whatever the maximum Stairmaster speed setting was that you could sustain without the bricks, you won’t be able to sustain that with a backpack full of bricks.
Yes. Now you are pushing the treadmill downhill with more force.
The difference may be that the Stepmill requires you to lift your own feet up and accelerate them forward to move them to the next step entirely with your own muscles, whereas the Stairmaster pedals have a significant spring that lifts each pedal up when you shift your weight to the other pedal and also bears some of the weight of your foot/leg (plus you’re not trying to accelerate your foot forward to the next step each time). So you’re not doing as much work to move each unloaded leg up/forward as you are on the Stepmill (or on real stairs).
We have a stair machine at our gym, but I’m not sure of the brand. It’s hard as fuck. Noobs like me can only do like 10 minutes on it, on low resistance, and I see the super-sweaty, fit people only doing maybe 15 minutes - presumably on higher resistance.
It’s a really good workout. If you can manage to not fall off!
I have used StairMasters and you can get a workout, but it’s not the same as climbing stairs IRL, which I have also done. StairMaster does not require much power, in the sense of how much force you exert. Even if you crank the speed, you are not pushing hard, but the faster speed can really raise your heart rate.
He did plenty of work in the physics sense of the word, which is force over distance. The fact that the weights ended up back in their starting position doesn’t matter.
I’ve spent many hours on the Stairmaster and have pondered the OP’s question long. And the answer is “no”.
First there are different variations of “stairmasters”. The “closest” to real stairs is the “mini escalator” type - as shown in the Stepmill video.
But even the “mini escalator” type it is not the same, because, as has been pointed out, you are not “lifting” your body weight since the steps “descend” below you.
Where the workout comes from is from the LIFTING of your legs, and having to keep up the rate that the machine is running at. So unlike the “walking in place” analogy (which is closer to a treadmill), it is “different” effort as you have to lift each leg to move to the next step.
So you ask: “but if all you’re doing is lifting each leg to the next step why would A) carrying a weighted backpack make it harder and B) why does leaning on the rails make it easier ?” The answer: with each step, you are momentarily holding all your weight on one leg - and then alternating the weight. This is “work”, and how hard is based on how much weight you are “holding”.
So what would be the REAL stair stepping recreation ? A longer stairmaster that doesn’t run continuously. Imagine an escalator that didn’t move until you were within, say 10 steps from the top. Once you reached the “max point”, then the escalator would “turn on” and roll you back down to the bottom, and then shut down again. In this manner, you would really be “stepping” - displacing your weight (as well as lifting your legs, alternating your weight). The problem with this is that it would require a pretty large amount of space (and ceiling height !). And there are issues with “turning on” and “turning off” in a smooth manner so as not to mess up the user too badly.
See, something like this is what I’m imagining any “stairmaster-like” device must do, if it is to give a truly stair-like workout. This is what I was trying to picture in Post #7, above. I’m trying to picture an escalator-like device that does what cormac262 describes here, but does it step-by-step as the user “ascends”. The escalator would “turn on” and lower your body at that portion of your stepping cycle when you aren’t trying to lift yourself, and would shut off when you are trying to lift yourself, thus forcing you to lift your weight against gravity at that portion of your stepping cycle.
The result is that you go up-and-down-and-up-and-down, but one step (or one portion of a stepping cycle) at a time.
The idea that you are “pushing the step downward against resistance” doesn’t make sense to me. I can’t picture how there’s any stair-like exercise in that. Lifting your body against gravity is a very different exercise than just lifting and moving your leg, or even walking forward at constant altitude. You have to be walking up stairs or up a hill. So I’m still wondering if any stair-master-like device really simulates that.
