Written by Wan Anis Ilyani bt Wan Mohammad Azhar
Most people love to kick off their day with a hot cup of coffee, together with sugar and milk.
Could you forget it for a while and start a new routine?
Maybe spend about 10 minutes walking up and down some stairs – sounds hard to do but this exercise helps you to boost up your energy levels compared to when you sip the coffee while taking the lift to your office.
Patrick J. O’Connor, one of the researcher from University of Georgia which conducted this research said the study is held in order to compare an exercise that could be achieved by people in an office setting, where they have access to stairs and a little time to be active, but not enough time to change into workout gear, shower and change back into work clothes (Graaf, 2017).
“We found, in both the caffeine and the placebo conditions, that there was not much change in how they felt.
“But with exercise, they did feel more energetic and vigorous.
“It was a temporary feeling, felt immediately after the exercise, but with the 50 milligrammes of caffeine, we didn’t get as big an effect,” said O’Connor.
Participants in this study, on separate days, were asked to take a capsule that contains caffeine or a placebo or spent 10 minutes walking up and down stairs at a low-density pace.
They were female college students that claimed themselves did not get enough sleep at least for six-and-a-half hours per night. They need to complete the verbal and computer-based tests to know how they felt and performed in cognitive tasks. This is used to measure the effects of the caffeine versus the exercises.
O’Connor believed stairs walking might increase people’s motivation for work, even not insignificant effect, even though both exercise or caffeine are not clearly proved to improve attention or memory.
However, he wants to further the research to look at benefits that one’s may get even if they just do exercise for 10 minutes.
It is important to know that exercise is good for the health. Unfortunately, most of them are not attentive of the advantages of exercise and living in unhealthy lifestyle even though they were all well aware of it.
So, instead of taking coffee in the morning and use an escalator or lift to get to your office, how about taking 10-minutes of stair walking to boost up your day?