Stair climbing is the climbing of a flight of stairs. It is often described as a "low-impact" exercise, often for people who have recently started trying to get in shape. A common exhortation in health pop culture is "Take the stairs, not the elevator".
In one study based on mean oxygen uptake and heart rate, researchers estimated that ascending a 15 cm (5.9 inches) step expends 0.46 kJ (0.11 kcal) for the average person, and descending a step expends 0.21 kJ (0.05 kcal). The study concluded that stair-climbing met the minimum requirements for cardiorespiratory benefits, and considered stair-climbing suitable for promotion of physical activity. [1]
Stair climbing has developed into the organized sport tower running. Every year several stair climbing races are held around the world with the competitors running up the stairs of some of the world's tallest buildings and towers (e.g., the Empire State Building, Gran Hotel Bali), or on outside stairs such as the Niesenbahn Stairway. World class athletes from the running and cycling worlds regularly compete in such events. Some have specialized exclusively in stair climbing races. Prizes, awards, and other accolades are given for the top performers by gender and age group. Stair climbing is one of the most grueling of sports, requiring competitors to move their entire body weight vertically, as well as horizontally. The results of more than 160 races on all continents are evaluated each year for the Towerrunning World Cup. The most important - about 18 so called "Masters Races" - have a predefined factor of 1.5 to 2.5, whereas all other races are given 0.4, 0.7 or 1 depending on class and internationality of the participants. 2010 World Cup winners were Melissa Moon (NZL) and Thomas Dold (GER). 2011 winners are Dold (3rd time) and Cristina Bonacina (ITA). The World Cup Final 2012 was hosted on December 8 in Bogota (COL).
An annual competition, 'Girnar Arohan Spardha', is held in Junagadh, India, and involves a race to climb and descend the steps of the Girnar mountain.
ESPN8 The Ocho has a televised event called "Slippery Stairs". [2]
Falling down a flight of stairs or just a couple of steps is very common during infants’ first exposure to stair descent. Infants are more likely to fall down stairs than any other age group. [3] In the United States, approximately 73,000 children between the ages of 6 months and 2 years have reported injury on stairs or steps in 2009. [4]
Stair descent involves perceptual, cognitive and motor abilities. [5] It relies heavily on visual information to enable balance and accuracy. Seeing obstacles ahead helps stair descent, but for infants the action of keeping their heavy head balanced enough to look down at their feet and the objective together, make the process very difficult. (Hurlke, 1998). Not seeing the task ahead causes confusion and disrupts concentration.
Infants tend to adopt one of several strategies closely associated with stair descent:
Some limited norms for stair climbing motor milestones have been established, but the process had historically been viewed like any other motor milestone - as a universal skill acquired through development.
One study looked at the typical age onset for stair ascent and descent, and compared them to other developmental milestones. It also looked at the stair climbing strategies that infants use. Consisting of 732 infants, and including parental assessment and documentation of motor skill achievements, along with in-depth interviews parents about the strategies involved and child assessment using laboratory stair apparatus. The results showed that children younger than 9 months of age were unable to go up or down stairs at all, or were only able to go up. By around 13 months, most infants could go upstairs and about half could ascend and descend stairs. Infants typically learned to descend stairs after they have already learned to ascend, with only about 12% achieved both stair-climbing skills at the same time. [6]
On average in this study, infants learned to crawl and cruise before learning to ascend stairs independently. Infants were able to climb up the stairs before they could walk, but walking tended to come before independent stair descent. While most of the infants had prior stair experience, the presence or absence of stairs in the home did not influence the onsets of crawling, cruising or stair descent. However, lack of exposure to stairs resulted in a significant time-lag between first learning to ascend and to descend. Differences in housing types created a so-called 'suburban advantage' (i.e. houses with stairs versus flats/apartments without).
Sliding backwards feet first is the safest approach to descending stairs due to the fact that the midline of the body is closer to the staircase providing an even weight distribution on all four limbs.[ citation needed ] This might explain why it is exceptionally difficult for older people to descend stairs, because their midline is so far way due to longer arms and legs.[ citation needed ]
Other research suggests that infants’ descent strategies may be related to their cognitive abilities. [7] This is why most parents teach their children to back down stairs, even though it's the safest it is also the most cognitively difficult descent strategy.
A toddler is a child approximately 1 to 3 years old, though definitions vary. The toddler years are a time of great cognitive, emotional and social development. The word is derived from "to toddle", which means to walk unsteadily, like a child of this age.
Stairs are a structure designed to bridge a large vertical distance between lower and higher levels by dividing it into smaller vertical distances. This is achieved as a diagonal series of horizontal platforms called steps which enable passage to the other level by stepping from one to another step in turn. Steps are very typically rectangular. Stairs may be straight, round, or may consist of two or more straight pieces connected at angles.
The Penrose stairs or Penrose steps, also dubbed the impossible staircase, is an impossible object created by Oscar Reutersvärd in 1937 and later independently discovered and made popular by Lionel Penrose and his son Roger Penrose. A variation on the Penrose triangle, it is a two-dimensional depiction of a staircase in which the stairs make four 90-degree turns as they ascend or descend yet form a continuous loop, so that a person could climb them forever and never get any higher. This is clearly impossible in three-dimensional Euclidean geometry but possible in some non-Euclidean geometry like in nil geometry.
A gait is a manner of limb movements made during locomotion. Human gaits are the various ways in which humans can move, either naturally or as a result of specialized training. Human gait is defined as bipedal forward propulsion of the center of gravity of the human body, in which there are sinuous movements of different segments of the body with little energy spent. Varied gaits are characterized by differences such as limb movement patterns, overall velocity, forces, kinetic and potential energy cycles, and changes in contact with the ground.
Waterfall is a lithograph by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher, first printed in October 1961. It shows a perpetual motion machine where water from the base of a waterfall appears to run downhill along the water path before reaching the top of the waterfall.
A baby walker is a device that can be used by infants who cannot walk on their own to move from one place to another. Modern baby walkers are also for toddlers. They have a base made of hard plastic sitting on top of wheels and a suspended fabric seat with two leg holes. In the US, baby walkers are responsible for about 2000 injuries annually to children serious enough to require a trip to the emergency room, prompting calls from pediatricians for their outright ban.
A delayed milestone, which is also known as a developmental delay, refers to a situation where a child does not reach a particular developmental milestone at the expected age. Developmental milestones refer to a collection of indicators that a child is anticipated to reach as they grow older.
Tower running is a sport which involves running up tall man-made structures. Usually the races take place on the internal staircases of skyscrapers, but the term can cover any foot race which involves a course that ascends a man-made structure.
Single-rope technique (SRT) is a set of methods used to descend and ascend on the same single rope. Single-rope technique is used in caving, potholing, rock climbing, canyoning, roped access for building maintenance and by arborists for tree climbing, although to avoid confusion in the tree climbing community, many have taken to calling it "stationary" rope technique.
Child development stages are the theoretical milestones of child development, some of which are asserted in nativist theories. This article discusses the most widely accepted developmental stages in children. There exists a wide variation in terms of what is considered "normal", caused by variations in genetic, cognitive, physical, family, cultural, nutritional, educational, and environmental factors. Many children reach some or most of these milestones at different times from the norm.
Gross motor skills are the abilities usually acquired during childhood as part of a child's motor learning. By the time they reach two years of age, almost all children are able to stand up, walk and run, walk up stairs, etc. These skills are built upon, improved and better controlled throughout early childhood, and continue in refinement throughout most of the individual's years of development into adulthood. These gross movements come from large muscle groups and whole body movement. These skills develop in a head-to-toe order. The children will typically learn head control, trunk stability, and then standing up and walking. It is shown that children exposed to outdoor play time activities will develop better gross motor skills.
The Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development is a standard series of measurements originally developed by psychologist Nancy Bayley used primarily to assess the development of infants and toddlers, ages 1–42 months. This measure consists of a series of developmental play tasks and takes between 45 – 60 minutes to administer and derives a developmental quotient (DQ) rather than an intelligence quotient (IQ). Raw scores of successfully completed items are converted to scale scores and to composite scores. These scores are used to determine the child's performance compared with norms taken from typically developing children of their age. The Bayley-III has three main subtests; the Cognitive Scale, which includes items such as attention to familiar and unfamiliar objects, looking for a fallen object, and pretend play, the Language Scale, which taps understanding and expression of language, for example, recognition of objects and people, following directions, and naming objects and pictures, and the Motor Scale, which assesses gross and fine motor skills such as grasping, sitting, stacking blocks, and climbing stairs. There are two additional Bayley-II Scales depend on parental report, including the Social-Emotional scale, which asks caregivers about such behaviors as ease of calming, social responsiveness, and imitation play, and the Adaptive Behavior scale which asks about adaptions to the demands of daily life, including communication, self-control, following rules, and getting along with others. The Bayley-III Cognitive and Language scales are good predictors of preschool mental test performance. These scores are largely used for screening, helping to identify the need for further observation and intervention, as infants who score very low are at risk for future developmental problems.
Child development involves the biological, psychological and emotional changes that occur in human beings between birth and the conclusion of adolescence.
Tummy time is a colloquialism for placing infants in the prone position while awake and supervised, to encourage development of the neck and trunk muscles and prevent skull deformations.
Infant cognitive development is the first stage of human cognitive development, in the youngest children. The academic field of infant cognitive development studies of how psychological processes involved in thinking and knowing develop in young children. Information is acquired in a number of ways including through sight, sound, touch, taste, smell and language, all of which require processing by our cognitive system. However, cognition begins through social bonds between children and caregivers, which gradually increase through the essential motive force of Shared intentionality. The notion of Shared intentionality describes unaware processes during social learning at the onset of life when organisms in the simple reflexes substage of the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development do not maintain communication via the sensory system.
Fine motor skill is the coordination of small muscles in movement with the eyes, hands and fingers. The complex levels of manual dexterity that humans exhibit can be related to the nervous system. Fine motor skills aid in the growth of intelligence and develop continuously throughout the stages of human development.
Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook is a 57-acre (0.23 km2) California State Park located just southwest of downtown Culver City. To some Los Angeles area residents, the site is more commonly known as the Culver City Stairs. This outdoor staircase is designed into the trails leading up to a view of the greater Los Angeles area.
The "Santa Monica Stairs" refer primarily to a pair of outdoor stairways in California descending to the northwest from Adelaide Drive in Santa Monica, to Santa Monica Canyon in Los Angeles.
Karen E. Adolph is a psychologist and professor known for her research in the field of infant motor development. She is the 2017 recipient of the Kurt-Koffka medal from the University of Giessen. Previous honors include the 1999 APA Boyd McCandless Award and 2002 American Psychological Foundation Robert L. Fantz Memorial Award. She has served as the President of the International Congress on Infant Studies. Adolph and her colleagues developed computerized video coding software, called Datavyu, and state-of-the-art recording technology to observe and code behavior. A related project, Databrary, provides a repository for video recordings of behavior and encourages open data sharing across research labs. Adolph is a recipient of a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development in support of her innovative research.
The International Skyrunning Federation (ISF) is the world governing body for skyrunning. The ISF today counts 41 Member nations. The Federation of Sports at Altitude (FSA) used to be the organization which governed and managed the sports of skyrunning. It has been replaced by the International Skyrunning Federation.