Office Stair Climbing Workouts

Short-Burst Cardio Lunch Break

A sedentary job not only has the potential to increase your waistline, it is also often characterized by stress, which can lead to heart disease. Lower your risk by hitting the stairs once a day. "Fitness" magazine offers a convenient work-friendly stair climbing routine from New York City trainer Eric Von Frohlich. In a mere 15 minutes during your lunch break, you can burn 150 calories while doing skater steps, squat jumps, cross-steps, lunges and power walking without leaving the building.

Office Hiking

Office-based wellness programs exploit the power of competition, often pitting departments against each other in friendly office competitions to reach healthy goals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that workplace health programs are a way of encouraging positive and lasting change and building unity among employees. The trainers at ACE Fitness agree. One way to encourage friendly fitness competition is to incorporate the staircase as part of an urban hiking program. Whether you use indoor or outdoor staircases, challenging co-workers to quickly hike the stairs will get their hearts pumping and burn excess calories.

Butt and Belly Busting Stair Workout

Pack a pair of light hand weights -- three to five pounds are sufficient -- to stash in your desk drawer for this workout you do three times a week. This routine mixes strength and cardio with hand weights and uses a staircase for a workout that will tone from the core on down. By incorporating dynamic moves from the running man, skater lunges, standing flye's, leg-step extensions and single-leg rotations, the workout created by Tracey Mallet, owner of the ATP Specific Training and Physical Therapy Center in South Pasadena, California, will have you burning 225 calories in a 20-minute break period.

Stair Walking

Cornel Chin, author of "Celebrity Body on a Budget," offers practical advice for office workers who want to be inconspicuous in their fitness efforts: Walk the stairs. Stair walking is as simple as it sounds -- repeatedly walk up and down stairs. Doing so "will 'fire up' your thigh and buttock muscles to make them work harder," writes Chin. Make your workouts more challenging by skipping steps and increasing your speed between floors. Stair walking has the potential to lower "bad" cholesterol and "increase" good cholesterol as well, because it is a type of moderate physical activity.