I have 1.5 clients who are interested in conditioning using stair/bleacher running. (“half a client” = friend whom I assist with specific fitness questions on a semi-annual basis).
Anyone have any comments/successes/tips about bleacher running?
Anyone ever try to get permission from a commercial facility (ballpark, etc) who has good bleachers for running? I’ve suggested they inquire at their individual facilities for permission, as one person said the best bleachers at at his AA baseball stadium.
Anyone have any comments/successes/tips about bleacher running?
I would say that the only benefit offered by running up bleachers is that they’re readily available for a track/football/soccer/whatever team. Certainly not worth the effort to seek out permission for access.
Find a decent hill, or if that fails, a set of stairs. Same diff.
My tri club uses stairs fairly regularly for training. We are fortunate to be based in Hamilton, Ontario where there are several city maintained pedestrian stairways for travelling from the lower city, up the escarpment (they call it the mountain here) to the upper city. The city is basically divided in half by the Niagara escarpment.
It’s a obviously a great aerobic workout, and we’ve even had some debates on whether is is actually a cycling specific excercise motion as well.
Hill workout can be quite beneficial, but I can tell you doing the stair running will get your quads burning in no time if you put some effort into it.
Prior to our group getting way too big and being kicked out of the building, I ran stairs once a week all winter at a 16 story building at a college campus. I thought it was great for building quad strength and working on HR. You can do all kinds of sets/ intervals etc. We ran up…but took the elevator down as our rest and the repeated 5-10 times, depending on the workout we were looking for. I am personally not a fan of bleachers only because the stairs blend together too much for me on the way down.
If it is only one or two people, I am not sure permission is needed, really.
I used to do some stair workouts at a local park with a training group from a local gym. The stairs ran up the side of a large hill maybe 6 fairly long flights or so. It took 7-10 min or so to run all of the stairs to the top. We’d start out with a warm up running all the way to the top once or twice, then did drills. Sprint drills, one leg hops, one leg hops skipping a stair, skipping 2 or 3 stairs, 4 if you can make it (both legs). We only did the drills on half the stairs. Then added in push-ups, squats other things in between.
This was one of my favorite workouts of the week, it was tough, but great to do with a group of people of varying abilities since everyone can provide support for eachother but go at different paces. I wish the group was still meeting up there. Have fun with this. I always felt stronger a couple days after these workouts. It could’ve just been in my head, but I think this workout has its benefits in building strength.
“The stairs ran up the side of a large hill maybe 6 fairly long flights or so. It took 7-10 min”
This is great info… how big the stair set and how long it took. Sounds like a wonderful bootcamp.
I’ll pass your info on. The ‘half client’ is seeking quad/glute/ham strength and stamina but without weights, if possible – and with speed. That’s why stairs came to mind.
(I actually run stairs inside my home sometimes. Burning quads, even from 10 min of indoor stairs while dinner water was boiling.)
… There are also stair-running competitions, even up the Sears Tower in Chi-town.
some climbing/skiing partners and I do a lot of stair climbing in the fall to train for climbing and ski mountaineering. it has big benefits for climbing and alpine ski touring but doesn’t do much for running. luckily seattle has several long sets of stairs in the city.