Will I Lose Belly Fat If I Climb The Stairs?

Belly fat is detrimental to your general well-being. Carrying excess pounds in your stomach sets you up for chronic conditions like high blood pressure, cancer and heart disease. The only way to lose belly fat is to lose weight overall. Losing this fat takes the right balance of lifestyle adjustments. Climbing the stairs can definitely have a positive contribution.

Type of Exercise

The concept of spot reduction, or losing fat in a particular place on the body, such as the belly, is known to be false. Performing ab crunches alone will not create a lean stomach. Losing weight, such as through cardiovascular exercise, will also reduce the amount of fat in your belly area. If you climb stairs at an intensity that elevates your heart rate and causes you to sweat, it will help you lose your belly fat.

Duration

To effectively lose weight, the American College of Sports Medicine recommends 60 to 90 minutes of physical activity performed five days a week. You need to factor stair climbing into your regular schedule and do it on a consistent basis for it to be effective at reducing your belly fat. Accumulated exercise time is just as effective. This means you can climb stairs in several bouts during the course of the day. Having a staircase at home would be convenient in this respect.

Interval Training

Interval training is an exercise method that involves alternating your intensity back and forth from low to high. This causes a high caloric expenditure according to MayoClinic.com. An interval workout on stairs can be as simple as sprinting up the stairs, jogging back down slowly and repeating. When you run up the stairs at a fast pace, you have to forcefully contract your abs to generate power. This in turn will give you an ab workout while you burn calories.

Muscle Activation

When you climb stairs, you activate multiple muscles in your lower body. The glutes, quadriceps, hamstrings and calves are the most notable. Any time you build muscle, even a slight amount, you increase your resting metabolic rate. This will further promote belly fat loss.

Importance of Diet

If you climb stairs every day of the week but continually eat foods that are high in fat and calories, you will cancel out your progress. Losing fat is a matter of expending more calories than you consume. If you reduce your daily intake by 500 calories for example, you can lose about 1 lb. a week. An additional daily expenditure of 500 calories from climbing stairs will result in about 2 lbs. of weight loss a week.