Sydney’s Fat Loss Expert

Lately I’ve been doing a bit of stair running sessions with my clients – who have a love/hate relationship with them and I’ve also been doing them myself to give my workouts a bit of variety.

There’s a number of things I love about them.

* They’re hard
* You don’t need to do them for ages
* It is a fantastic bodyweight workout where you don’t need any equipment – just a few sets of stairs
* You get to train in the great outdoors – perfect if you’re like me in a place like Sydney!
* And stairs are an awesome weight loss workout without one shadow of a doubt.

So I got the Stair Fitness Guru, Virgil Aponte (who has worked with WNBA and pro baseball players) to answer a few questions I had about stair exercises and today is the first of a 2 part q n a DPM hotseat series.

DPM: What is the deal with stair climbing Virgil? I mean, can you actually get a good workout from them? I know some people just view stairs as a means of getting from point A to point B.

Virgil Aponte (VA): The deal is they are as viable a fitness option as running, swimming, weight training, body weight exercises and any other fitness option.

When you consider that stairs can be used for strength, power, conditioning, flexibility and fat loss it stands right up there with all the other fitness options available.

It’s a definite keeper in the my fitness tool box as well as countless elite athletes and celebrities for one simple reason: Stairs flat out deliver results!

I think people view stairs as just getting from point A to B or that you can just walk or run them.

One simple workout in the stairs using ANA Runs, Hops & Crossover Forwards and Buddy Carry’s and they’ll see there is a lot more to stairs then just walking or running them.

DPM: Okay, so we’ve established they’re effective so why switch to stair running from my normal sprint sessions?

VA: I’d keep sprints in but I’d add hills and stairs for a change of pace.

Plus stairs are better a helping one develop leg strength & lend themselves better to adding plyo work (such as hopping up stairs).

Stairs are also inherently safer than sprints because there is less stress on your hamstrings.

Although I’d still say it’s best to do all of them if you can so you can reap the benefits of each.

DPM: What about the upper body? How can we work that with the stair sessions?

VA: If there is one drawback/complaint with stair training is how do you work the upper body. The simple answer is you can’t.

It’s just like running or sprinting. You must supplement upper body work to make your training complete. The thing is that this is very easy to so.

In reality you don’t even need to leave the stairs for a full body workout. Stairs will take care of your overall conditioning, lower body strength & power and you simply supplement your upper body work with body weight exercises.

And when I was the strength & conditioning coach for the New York Liberty (WNBA team) in 2002 we lived on using bands along with our stair work. Theresa Weatherspoon really turned me onto them as she always traveled with fitness bands. It was funny because I turned her onto to stairs and she turned me onto bands.

A simple fitness band which you can attach to a stair rail or door and you can easily do pushing, pulling and core work followed by your stair climbs. It does not get simpler or more effective than that.

I have 2 bands that I love: JC Fitness Bands & BodyLastics Fitness Bands but there are others you can find that are excellent as well.

DPM: Cool. I really love doing prisoner stair runs (hands behind ears) which I find works the upper body a little bit. So what about people that don’t really have access to any decent stairs. What can they do if anything?

VA: Anything is never a problem in my book. One only needs to look at their own body for a workout. In fact most experts would agree these days that any exercise should start with your own body weight. If you can’t control your own body then work on that and progress from there.

DPM: Very good point Virgil. People do under-estimate the effectiveness of a bodyweight workout first and foremost. You can do so many things to make it more challenging.

I’ll be back with part 2 next week but in the meantime Virgil has given me 3 special reports that he has said to only give people who are dead serious about stair fitness training.

If you’re keen to get these 3 reports – Stair Lunge Variations, Stair Climb Basics and Stairs For Fast Fat Loss – simply email me – daniel@dpmperformance.com.au with STAIR EBOOKS in the title and ask me to flick them through to you.

They’re free and with no strings attached.

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