Can You Climb 4 Flights of Stairs This Quickly? Here’s What It Means If You Can’t
This simple text can reveal a lot about your mortality risk and cardiovascular health.

I consider myself a pretty fit person. But oftentimes, when I walk up the stairs, I get completely winded. If you’ve noticed this, too, fear not: According to a recent article in CNET, the term for this phenomenon is “exertional intolerance,” and it refers to the quick, out-of-nowhere surge of your heart rate. Unlike when you do a workout, you’re not warmed up, “your muscles are cold, your heart rate is low, and your body is not ready to move suddenly,” they explain. Therefore, your cardiovascular system has a rapid need for more oxygen.
However, this doesn’t mean you should completely dismiss your aerobic capabilities with stair climbing. According to a study presented by Spanish scientists at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), how quickly you can walk up four flights of stairs can be a major indicator of your heart health and mortality risk.
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This is how quickly you should be able to climb four flights of stairs.
“The stairs test is an easy way to check your heart health,” said study author Jesús Peteiro, MD, a cardiologist at University Hospital a Coruña, via Healthline. “If it takes you more than one and a half minutes to ascend four flights of stairs, your health is suboptimal, and it would be a good idea to consult a doctor.”
To arrive at this amount of time, the researchers enlisted 165 participants with known or suspected coronary artery disease, all of whom experienced chest pain or shortness of breath when exercising, according to News Medical.
First, they walked or ran on a treadmill until exhaustion and had their metabolic equivalents (METs) measured. As Healthline explains, METs are a measure of the energy you expend when at rest. “So, an activity with a MET value of 4 means you’re exerting four times the energy than you would if you were sitting still,” they explain.
The participants rested for 15 to 20 minutes and then quickly climbed four flights of stairs (60 steps) without stopping. Here is what the team concluded:
- Those who climbed the stairs in less than 40-45 seconds achieved more than 9-10 METs
- Those who climbed the stairs in 1.5 minutes or longer achieved less than 8 METs
- Achieving 10 METs during exercise is linked with lower mortality rate—1 percent or less yearly, or 10 percent over a 10-year period
- Achieving 8 METs or less is linked with a high mortality rate—2-4 percent yearly, or 30 over a 10-year period
Moreover, imaging of the participants’ heart function while climbing stairs revealed that:
- 32 percent of those who climbed the stairs in less than 60 seconds had abnormal heart function during exercise, a marker of coronary heart disease
- 58 percent of those who climbed the stairs in more than 1.5 minutes had abnormal heart function during exercise
This demonstrates the importance of the test in predicting heart health, but it also points to the fact that it’s not a substitute for other healthy lifestyle interventions and doctor’s appointments.
“Based on the study, the ability to climb stairs can be used as a crude way to assess one’s physical function that may be predictive of overall heart health,” Renee Bullock-Palmer, MD, a cardiologist and director of the Women’s Heart Center and director of noninvasive cardiac imaging at the Deborah Heart and Lung Center in New Jersey, who was not involved in the study, told Healthline.
“However, I believe that this crude self-assessment cannot take the place of a proper physical exam, and history by a physician, and a proper, appropriately indicated stress test,” she added.
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Climbing stairs is also a great exercise for overall health.
Aside from this test, using stair climbing as a form of cardiovascular exercise has many science-backed merits.
As Best Life previously reported, climbing just 50 steps a day can result in a 20 percent drop in the risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), “which includes common killers like coronary artery disease and ischemic stroke,” as was evidenced by a study published in the medical journal Atherosclerosis.
Furthermore, a study published in The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research (JSCR) found that, for people between the ages of 65 and 80, climbing two flights of stairs (about 30 steps) a few times twice a week can improve muscle strength, walking speed, and the time it takes to stand up from sitting in chair.
As Best Life noted about the importance of these study results, “Established research has proven that people lose roughly 3 to 8 percent of their muscle mass each decade after age 30—and after age 65, it increases to between 6 and 15 percent.”