why we like the stairs

I went into town yesterday and watched a movie with the kids.
Afterward we went to the central city park and ran the bleachers (stairs).
now the way we do it is;
run a flight of stairs, run the hill beside the stairs ( which is half the distance) and run another part of the hill that turns into stairs (just for fun).
took us about 15 min and had my HRM working at about 85%


Now after the first run I'm usually huffing and puffing and questioning my sanity, the boy however is wondering why i'm making such a big deal of minimal work. In my defence I outweigh him by 50K and a score of years. Having said that he wore a flannel shirt and I was wishing I had the kutzpah to take my t shirt off.


anyway;
The reason we like stairs (and hills) - the cardiovascular out put is tremendous. thats a lot of respitory work at 85% for 15 min. So we are getting a marvelous heart and lung work out. So much more fun than counting laps around the track. A lot of work done, harder and in a shorter amount of time than if we used another form of steady state cardio.
we're getting our sprint work in without the impact of a flat track wearing on our hips.
We're digging in and giving ourselves a gut check,(me moreso than the boy), this isn't a run walk senerio (more on that in a minute) we run those stairs and hills.
volume; The stair work creates repetitive effort hip and knee flexion. muscular development. the fact that its 15 min and not 1hour 15 min means we arent tapping into the bodies protien reserves to get through. ( catabolism)
Now the way we do this we run up, but we walk down. we dont sit at the top or at the bottom. the walk down breaks the respiratory system but works the muscular system even harder. Walking down we are doing eccentric contractions contiuously. once again hitting that repetitive muscular (eccentric ) contraction volume work.
because its nonstop work we are also doing strength endurance work. yes its body weight work. but its still muscular strength, high volume, but not excesive.
Now what most are probably interested in, WE ARE BURNING FAT, working in this physical capasity range, we are burning our body fat reserves without catabolising our muscle tissue.

As we continue to incorperate these stair runs into our training we'll add a lap at a time, slowly improving our conditioning. Our time spent in the workout will slowly expand, but not by huge amounts at a time. We dont want this to become a drawn out steady state cardio session.
The stair work works our cardiovasucular system
toughens us mentally
improves our conditioning
improves muscle tone
improves endurance strength
and burns fat
whats not to like