Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff works dot com where
Speaker 1: smart happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, how
Speaker 1: do I burn calories on a stair machine? Let's start
Speaker 1: with normal stairs and understand why they burn calories, and
Speaker 1: then we can look at stair machines as a special case.
Speaker 1: The how stuff Works article on how horsepower works explains
Speaker 1: the unit of power known as horsepower. One horse power
Speaker 1: is five hundred fifty foot pounds of work per second.
Speaker 1: If a horse or an engine were to raise a
Speaker 1: five hundred and fifty pound load at a rate of
Speaker 1: one ft per second, it would be exerting one horse
Speaker 1: power of effort. So let's imagine that you're standing at
Speaker 1: the bottom of the Empire State Building in New York
Speaker 1: and you start climbing the stairs. Let's also imagine that
Speaker 1: you a hunder of fifty pounds. If each step raises
Speaker 1: you one foot, and if you walk up the stairs
Speaker 1: at a rate of one step every second, then you
Speaker 1: were doing a hundred fifty foot pounds of work every second,
Speaker 1: or a little more than a quarter of a horse power.
Speaker 1: If you were to run up the steps at a
Speaker 1: rate of four steps every second, you would be doing
Speaker 1: six hundred foot pounds of work every second, or one
Speaker 1: point o nine horsepower. One horse power exerted over an
Speaker 1: hour is equal to six hundred forty one calories. So
Speaker 1: if you were to run up the stairs at a
Speaker 1: rate of five hundred fifty foot pounds of work every
Speaker 1: second for an hour, you would burn off six d
Speaker 1: forty one calories. It's hard for human beings to maintain
Speaker 1: that level of effort for an entire hour. A normal
Speaker 1: human might be able to maintain a rate that burns
Speaker 1: two hundred or three hundred calories per hour, which is
Speaker 1: unfair when you consider that you can gain all that
Speaker 1: back by eating a single candy bar on a stairm sheen.
Speaker 1: It doesn't appear that you're going anywhere, but really you are.
Speaker 1: Imagine that you are climbing a long ladder, but the
Speaker 1: ladder is sinking in the mud as fast as you're
Speaker 1: climbing it. If you were to stop climbing, you would
Speaker 1: sink into the mud too, so you have to keep climbing.
Speaker 1: It would appear that you're going nowhere, but in fact
Speaker 1: you're climbing at the same rate that the ladder is sinking,
Speaker 1: so you are doing work. The lack of movement is
Speaker 1: an illusion. A stair machine creates the same kind of
Speaker 1: illusion as anyone who has used one can tell you
Speaker 1: you are doing work. For more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics, because it how stuff works dot com.
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