Snapshot of the Day

I work in a office located on the fifth floor of a building and even though 3 elevators are available, I decided to take quite often the stairs for 2 main reasons: The first one, because usually it takes a while to get the elevator and the second reason is because I think it is a good opportunity to do some physical activity at work.
Some times, I even take the challenge to go up faster than colleagues who use the elevators because at rush hour there are more people that stop in every single floor even to the second floor. I do the same challenge when I want to go down and to my surprise I won quite a lot of these personal ego-guest who is faster- kind of races myself. Usually I do this 3 times a day when I arrive at the office early
morning then after my daily walk in the parking lot when I had finished my lunch and the last one during a break time in the afternoon.

Yesterday I was counting the steps from one floor to the next and found out there was 20 in total, that multiplied by 5 floors makes it 100 steps. Later on I tried to figured out how many calories this activity can help me burn and found on that per every step up you burn 0.11 calories and 0.05 for every step down according to a research.
By doing the math 100 steps times 0.11 calories totals 11 calories and 100 steps times 0.05 when I go down totals another 5 calories. They all together adds 16 calories if you do it twice a day is 32, three times is 48 and so on.
In terms of total calories burned it is actually no much, but the activity itself brings me other extra benefits like increasing my capacity to oxygenation, raising my heart rate, off course working out your muscles and even a few minutes of meditation that I am really happy to have.
Taking the steps might seems irrational, but I started to find a increasingly popular choice these days where most of our times we spend seating in front of the computer for long hours.

[click] Mar. 20, 2010(Sat) 06:24 am

Photo by Jared Tabel