"The lift's right there"

Two floors. The lift is in front of you and the stairs are through a door. It's not a decision anyone makes, and I'd like to make it one.

The NHS guidelines list walking up stairs among the vigorous activities, alongside running and swimming. Vigorous means you're breathing hard and can't say more than a few words without a pause, and seventy-five minutes of it a week meets the target that takes a hundred and fifty of moderate. Two floors won't get you there. But two floors, four times a day, five days a week, is forty flights, and forty flights is a fair amount of vigorous activity that was on your route anyway.

There's a body of research on stairs and the heart. Sophie Paddock and colleagues published a meta-analysis in 2026 pooling nine studies with about four hundred and eighty thousand people, and found that people who climbed stairs had markedly lower rates of death from cardiovascular disease and somewhat lower death from any cause over the follow-ups. These were observational studies, and the obvious caution is that people who take the stairs are already fitter, and the studies can't fully separate the stairs from the fitness. I'd take from it only that the direction is the one you'd expect and that stairs are not a trivial thing. The NHS's classification of them as vigorous is enough on its own.

The practical case is simpler than the health case. Two floors is about thirty steps. At an ordinary pace that's forty seconds. The lift, when there are people waiting and it's stopping on the way, is often longer, and I'd ask you to time that too, because "the lift's right there" is a statement about where it is and not about how long it takes. What's right there is the button. The lift is somewhere on the fourth floor with its doors open.

There's a version of this for the person who works on the eighth floor and can't take the stairs the whole way, and it's to get out at five and walk three. And there's one for anyone who finds the stairs hard, which is that hard is what vigorous means, and that the stairs get easier in weeks, and that if two floors leaves you unable to speak at the top, chapter 22 is where to look.