Lose over 3 pounds a year by climbing up and down 5 flights of stairs a day.

An easy way to add a few more steps to your day is to take the stairs. Over a year you can easily lose 3 pounds using this one simple strategy. You don’t think it can be that much? Let’s run some numbers.

You burn about 10 calories per minute going up a flight of stairs and 7 calories per minute going down. It takes about 2.5 minutes to climb 5 flights of stairs. It takes about 1 minute to descend them. When you add all that up, you burn 32 calories ascending and descending 5 flights of stairs.

If you can make this one simple change a day—ascending and descending 5 flights of stairs—you can burn off over 3 pounds a year! That’s a lot of weight. It could be all you need to keep from becoming obese.

Most people don’t take the stairs. Researchers found that only 6-9% of people chose to use the stairs instead of elevators or escalators. If they were aware how many calories they could burn, maybe they might change their minds.

For a while I worked on the fourth floor of an office building. I noticed that people who worked on the second floor used the stairs a lot of the time. Once you worked on the third floor or above forget it, you used the elevator.

When I first started working there, I was excited I would be able to use this strategy. I could see the calories just dropping off as I happily climbed stairs everyday. It didn’t turn out exactly as I expected.

I was going up and down stairs 10 times a day! That’s a lot of stairs to go up. I was getting tired and sweaty and neither is a good way to get ahead on your job. So I decided to modify my strategy.

I decided I would aim to go up the stairs once or twice a day, depending on how I felt, and I would always go down the stairs. Most days I was able to go up the stairs twice a day and go down the stairs 10 or so times a day. That’s still a lot of extra calories burned for one simple change.