How many calories are burned walking a flight of stairs?

(5) On April 25, 2011 at 9:04 pm D T [0] said:

Actually, your weight already includes gravity (which is why you would "weigh" less on the moon). It shouldn't be factored in separately.

Your weight (in kg) is actually the force (in Newtons) m*g that gravity causes you to exert on a scale. So the energy you burn (in joules) is your weight times the number of meters of vertical displacement (mgh).

A 75 kg person would burn (approximately) 75*3 = 225 joules climbing up a 3m flight of stairs. Of course this isn't exact but it's probably close enough.

1 cal ~ 4.2 joules and 1 Cal ~ 4200 joules

So to burn 1 Calorie you need to climb 4200/225 ~ 18 2/3 flights of stairs. Seems absurdly high but there's a reason it's so hard to lose weight. :)

(4) On May 1, 2010 at 10:23 pm NatalieK1 [0] said:

Living in England we weigh ourselves in pounds and measure height in feet so here is an old fashioned calculation.

My Mathematics professor tells me that one ft pound is 0.000323831435900 kcals (according to the application Scientific Notebook).

I weigh about 150 pounds and the flight of stairs in my home is about 8 ft. Going upstairs I therefore increase my potential energy by 1200 ft pounds, or 0.3886 Calories.

I personally normally go up stairs so slowly that I don't believe that my residual burn is as great as that quoted by Kc1970.

(3) On March 25, 2010 at 10:12 am Kc197O [0] said:

The calculation is for a perfectly efficient system lifting 75kg up 2m.

75 * 10 * 2 1500 J 0.359 kcal

(Note that one "Calorie" in dietary terms is 1000 cal = 1kcal)

However, a flight of stairs is closer to 3m so we actually get a value per flight of about 0.538 kcal per flight.

The human body, however, (a) is not a perfectly efficient machine and (b) does not stop working when you get to the top.

Climbing stairs creates a residual energy burn for a short while after you have finished climbing (compared to a resting state your heart rate remains elevated, burning more calories than it would have done if you had stayed on the sofa).

These factors combine to give the actual energy burn as quoted in the wikianswer. The figure comes from studies done on people climbing flights of stairs and measuring their energy burn compared to a normal resting state.

(2) On March 17, 2010 at 1:16 am Parsonnt [0] said:

But I believe your math may also be flawed. In my calculations, 1500 joules is 0.36 kcal.

(1) On March 10, 2010 at 8:15 pm Mlaporte1 [0] said:

Logic isn't flawed. Math (from what I can see) isn't either. The "missing" step is the knowledge that in health and food circles the "calories" that folks talk about are actually kilo-calories / kcals.

So, in your math, the "food/health" calories burned would be .636 calories.

This missing step was, IIRC, the fatal flaw of the so-called cold water diet, which was premised on the fact that it took a human 1 calorie to raise the temperature of 1ml of water 1 degree celcius. Using that logic, if you drank a litre of water just above freezing, thus raising it about 35 degrees, you'd burn 35000 calories.

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