How many flights of stairs a day is enough
· 4 min read
More than five a day is the number with the best evidence behind it. But the five flights in that study are not the flights your iPhone counts, and in Apple Health terms the target is closer to three.
Where five comes from
In 2023 a team led by Lu Qi at Tulane published a study in the journal Atherosclerosis using the UK Biobank, a health record of more than 450,000 adults followed for a median of twelve and a half years. People who climbed more than five flights of stairs a day had a 20% lower risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, which covers coronary artery disease and stroke.
The more striking result went the other way. People who had been climbing stairs and then stopped ended up with a 32% higher risk than people who never reported climbing them at all.
Their flight is ten steps
The Biobank did not measure anyone climbing. It asked, on a touchscreen: at home, during the last 4 weeks, about how many times a day do you climb a flight of stairs? (approx 10 steps). People picked a band: none, 1 to 5, 6 to 10, and so on up.
So “five flights” in the study means about fifty steps, and that is how Tulane described it too.
Your iPhone’s flight is ten feet
Apple Health counts no steps on a staircase. It scores a flight for roughly every ten feet of climbing, which on ordinary stairs is about 16 steps.
Fifty steps at a normal 7½-inch rise is a little over 31 feet. That is about three flights in Health. If you open the Health app, look at Flights Climbed and see a 3, you are already at the study’s threshold, not two flights short of it.
What the study does not show
It is observational. It found that the people who climbed stairs had less heart disease, not that the stairs caused the difference, and people who choose the stairs differ from people who do not in plenty of other ways. It also counted only stairs at home, from memory.
None of that makes three flights a bad target. It makes it a reasonable one, stated in the unit your phone actually records, rather than a number borrowed from a questionnaire that measured something else.