Skipping steps is faster. The height and distance energy burn is roughly the same whether you walk up normally, backwards, skipping steps, or crawling (within reason). However your baseline metabolism is constant, so the faster method burns fewer calories.
Let’s say you were walking up stairs for 10 miles. That’s about 40,000 stairs. I would estimate that would take about 10 hours to do. But skipping steps you’d be done in maybe 6 hours. So in either case the stairs burn say 5000 calories. But going slower you have like 1000 calories of baseline metabolic burn, and skipping steps only 600. So skipping steps might be about 7% more efficient overall.
Skipping steps is faster. The height and distance energy burn is roughly the same whether you walk up normally, backwards, skipping steps, or crawling (within reason). However your baseline metabolism is constant, so the faster method burns fewer calories.
Let’s say you were walking up stairs for 10 miles. That’s about 40,000 stairs. I would estimate that would take about 10 hours to do. But skipping steps you’d be done in maybe 6 hours. So in either case the stairs burn say 5000 calories. But going slower you have like 1000 calories of baseline metabolic burn, and skipping steps only 600. So skipping steps might be about 7% more efficient overall.
I was wondering if it might be something along these lines. Taking less steps seems more advantageous then lower steps, metabolically.