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