Exercise hint: Up and down the staircase

It doesn’t matter if you are going up or going down. Stairs are always the better way to go!

I recently moved into a building with a nice park outside, just below the building. At the base of the park, there is an easily accessible set of stairs to get up to the main living level...but if you watch, almost everybody takes the adjacent elevator instead, leaving the stairs more empty than a garbage can at a raccoon convention.

People seem to take the elevator in almost a robotic, acceptance kind of way.

Ditto for the grocery store, train station, airport or anywhere else there might be a moving escalator to get you to the top floor right next to a nice flight of old-fashioned stairs.

Why the elevator over the dreaded steps? Why the escalator vs. taking the staircase? Force of habit? An unwillingness to break from routine and just follow the crowd? It figures that way as people seem to naturally gravitate to the elevator or escalator without much thought process.

Well, folks, I would argue that if you don't want to gravitate somewhere else too soon (that place being below ground level and very sedentary), you might want to think about taking those steps.

Nothing like getting the heart pumping and the old cardiovascular system a little jump-start.

Here’s the deal: If you live 44 floors up, okay, you’re off the hook. If you're carrying four bags of groceries, or if it is ten degrees outside with a 20-mile-per-hour wind—again, you get a mulligan.

But otherwise, do yourself a favor: "take a hike"—up and down the staircase.

Editor’s note: In addition, you might be afflicted, as I have been as of late, by the disease hereafter to be named FOECB, very unscientifically meaning Fear of Elevator Cable Breaking. I have only a mild condition now, but it is getting worse, and the prognosis: not good for the future.

Something about me being 30 stories up and my entire life’s existence dependent on an unseen cable that is inspected once a year…and that is on a good year (usually an election year).

Thanks anyway, I’ll take the stairs.