Find four flights of stairs. Time yourself climbing all 60 steps at a brisk pace, without stopping and without running.
The seconds on the clock line up with your exercise capacity and your longer-term risk of dying from heart disease.
The benchmark comes from a study of 165 patients presented at a European Society of Cardiology imaging congress in December 2020.
Finishing in under 40 to 45 seconds put patients at more than 9 to 10 metabolic equivalents, or METs, a measure of exertion where 1 MET is the energy you burn sitting still.
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At that fitness level, annual mortality was around 1 percent, or roughly 10 percent over a decade.
Take 1.5 minutes or longer and the picture changes.
Those patients scored below 8 METs, which the researchers linked to a mortality rate of 2 to 4 percent per year, or about 30 percent over ten years.
The same slow group showed more signs of trouble on cardiac imaging.
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Fifty-eight percent had abnormal heart function during exercise testing, compared with 32 percent of those who finished the stairs in under a minute.
Why speed on stairs tells you so much
Climbing loads the heart, lungs and legs at the same time.
It draws on cardiovascular endurance, lower-body strength, balance and coordination in one short effort.
That is why speed on a set of stairs tracks closely with formal treadmill testing.
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If it takes you more than one-and-a-half minutes to ascend four flights of stairs, your health is suboptimal, and it would be a good idea to consult a doctor.
The caveats behind the numbers
The 165 people in the test were referred for exercise testing because of known or suspected coronary artery disease.
They were not a general-population sample, so the exact mortality percentages do not translate one-to-one to healthy adults.
Still, the pattern that slower climbers show worse heart function and higher risk lines up with broader research.
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A much larger meta-analysis published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology in 2024 pooled data on more than 480,000 participants aged 35 to 84 across nine studies.
People who climbed stairs regularly had roughly a 24 percent lower risk of dying from any cause and a 39 percent lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease compared with those who did not.
The analysis noted that the more stairs climbed, the greater the benefit appeared to be.
How to read your time and what to do next
If your climb sits between 60 and 90 seconds, you are in the middle ground and talking with a doctor before ramping up hard training is a sensible step.
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Over 90 seconds is the group Dr. Peteiro flagged for medical review.
To improve the time, the fix is to climb more stairs, more often.
Skipping the elevator on short trips, adding short interval bouts up and down a staircase, and building leg strength with squats and lunges are among the most direct ways to raise both MET capacity and stair speed.
Any staircase in your home, at work or in a subway station will do. The clock is the only equipment you need.
This article is made and published by Ida-Marie Palm Varbæk, who may have used AI in the preparation.