Taylor Johnson (left) and Fin Godfrey (right) helped coordinate the Take the Stairs challenge. Here, they pose with participant and raffle winner Aishwarya Balamurugan. (Photo by authors.)
There’s a frequent tendency for employees to resort to the transportation box to get from floor to floor—an elevator. All conveniences aside, Occupational Health Services (OHS) has been using educational incentives and the chance to be entered into a raffle to encourage employees to think about their cardiovascular health and take the stairs. And, in an effort to leave no educational opportunity untapped, OHS adorned staircases around the Frederick campus with messages about sun safety throughout the months of June and July.
They called it the “Take the Stairs” challenge: part of OHS’s focus on wellness topics to bring about a healthier employee community. Each monthly Take the Stairs challenge has a health-related secondary theme, such as nutrition, sun protection, or exercise, to raise awareness about those aspects of living a healthy life.
OHS’s midsummer theme, SPF, or sun protection factor, was inspired by the summer’s high ultraviolet levels and warm days that, without proper protection from the sun, pose an increased risk of sunburn and, in some cases, subsequent melanoma. The staff placed pictures of small, enthusiastic suns holding a sunscreen bottle throughout the staircases of several buildings across campus. Posters informed employees to take the stairs, find a sun, and bring it back to OHS to be entered into the raffle.
OHS drew seven raffle winners who were each given an umbrella, a beach chair, and a grilling set. Yet, even those contestants who didn’t win were given a colored cup filled with tiny flyers as a small token commending their participation. These vibrant cups were meant to be a stimulating way to spread information on sun health, beyond simply placing the kinds of posters that’d commonly found in the workplace. The flyers inside gave employees ways to self-scan for different types of skin cancer and encouraged them to wear their SPF outdoors. The cups also contained a few workout bands that encouraged physical activity.
OHS’s initiative to get employees walking more and taking the stairs is much more than just a scavenger hunt. In a study done by Harvard University, male alumni were periodically mailed questionnaires pertaining to their physical activity. The study tracked their overall health from 1988 to 2008, to see whether or not physical activity could be correlated to the age at which they died. The primary variable was the number of flights of stairs each participant climbed per week.
According to the results, “prevalence of hypertension and diabetes reported at baseline by participants was lower with each increase in the number of floors climbed,” and “compared with men who reported climbing fewer than 10 floors/wk, higher amounts of stair climbing were significantly associated with lower risk for all-cause mortality.” Although taking the stairs is a normal physical activity and the experimental subjects’ distinct lifestyles could have impacted the results, these data suggest stair-climbers could avoid heart disease more than others.
Another statistic from Duke University found that “two flights of stairs climbed per day can lead to six pounds of weight loss over one year.” This can contribute to efforts to maintain one’s body weight. Data suggest that climbing the stairs can burn 8 to 11 calories per minute. Of course, weight loss depends on other factors, too, such as diet and hydration.
With these things in mind, Take the Stairs aims to help employees create and develop lasting habits that directly contribute to one’s health and well-being—one step at a time.
OHS’s final challenge of the summer and fall will encourage NCI’s workforce to achieve their weekly recommended amount of exercise: at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To that end, images of dumbbell weights will be placed throughout staircases across campus for employees to retrieve and bring back to OHS to receive an exercise journal and information regarding physical activity. Although 150 minutes may seem unrealistic to fit in during a busy workweek, breaking it down to 30 minutes a day, five days per week makes it much more doable. Taking the stairs at work is just one of the many ways to meet this.
Teaser photo: cropped from original image by Unsplash on Freerange Stock
