Stair & Strength Workout: Fast & Furious 15s

Work your entire body with this fast-paced stair & strength workout!

Welcome to another great Wild Workout Wednesday Link Up where Annmarie from The Fit Foodie Mama, Jen from Pretty Little Grub, and I bring you workout ideas, motivation, inspiration and recipes to try. Join us each week by reading along, linking up and grab the button to proudly display on your blog/in your posts! 

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Please welcome the last of many fabulous guest posters: Kim from Running on the Fly!

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Hello! I’m excited to be guest posting for Nicole! This is Kim from the blog, Running on the Fly . I have been a serious runner for almost 12 years, and have been a distance runner for the past nine years. My favorite distance is the half marathon (I’ve run 35 of them), but I have also done two ultra’s and am currently training for my fifth marathon (Grandma’s Marathon, June 2017).

Although running is my main form of fitness, it’s no secret that I love my stair workouts.

In fact, I try to incorporate stair workouts into my regular fitness regimen even when I don’t have a stair climb event on my calendar. We’ve all heard the saying that hills are speed work in disguise, right? Well, I believe running stairs is like running hills (on steroids) because the incline is usually much steeper than any old hill you may find in nature.

With my current marathon training, I’m mixing in speed work biweekly. I’m not a track-running guru (though I do track workouts on occasion), so I have been doing other methods of speed work to keep it interesting….and recently I squeezed in an intense stair workout to the mix.

I’m also an advocate for all things cross-training, and strength-training. Why not combine the two into my speed session?

I give you my latest workout: The Fast & Furious 15’s!

The stairway I utilized is actually an outdoor stairway on the college campus nearby (also situated on the edge of a golf course). Unlike an indoor stairway, the steps are elongated (longer and wider) and the stairway itself has 18 steps (most indoor stairwells have 10-12 steps). The incline is not as steep as a traditional indoor stairway, though.

Being the steps are longer and wider, they are spread further apart than usual. I’m a tall gal (5’9), so I usually do “double steps,” but on this stairway a “single step” is the equivalent distance to a “double step” on a traditional stairway.

As mentioned, I also added in strength-training moves to make this more of circuit workout. I did 15 sets of hammer curls, 15 sets of bicep curls, and 15 sets of shoulder presses after each set of 15 flights.  The weights I used were 8-pound hand weights…not super heavy, hence the 15-rep count.

A trick I use, when running stairs, to help myself keep count of the flights is to alternate which foot I take the first step with. I started with my right foot for the first flight (r-i-g-h-t  has five letters, which is an odd number…like the numbers 1, 3,5,etc.) and I alternated starting with my left foot (l-e-f-t has four letters, which is an even number…like 2,4,6,etc.). Sound simple enough? I probably could set my watch to record these as laps…but I’m not a tech genius (ha! not even by a long shot!), so the old-school method of counting on my own works for me.

The entire workout took me around 50 minutes from start to finish (add a few extra minutes here and there for the photo ops). I also took a brief break between circuits for water. If you do the math, that’s 60 total flights run and 60 total reps of each strength move. So what if the golfers nearby were watching (it was men’s league night LOL)…sometimes you just gotta do what needs to get done, right? Thankfully, I was able to run each set of stairs strong, with no tripping or face-planting, and I had my back to the golfing action when I did the weights.

Care to give this a whirl? You could also do this as an indoor workout, but I would recommend doing 20 flights of stairs (for each set) to up the intensity a bit.

A big hug and thanks to Nicole for featuring this blog post! You can also find me at my blog (Running on the Fly), on Facebook (Running on the Fly), Instagram (@runningonthefly), Pinterest (KimberlyHatting), and Twitter (@runningonthefly).

Do you ever employ stair workouts to your training, or for general maintenance?