Six one-minute stair bouts improved cognition in study

A staircase can be a laboratory when the workout lasts six minutes. In a University of Otago–Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka study, about 50 adults aged 18–36 walked up and down stairs in six one-minute bouts, at a relatively intense pace, before taking cognitive tests.

The design gave the researchers a built-in comparison. Each participant also completed a separate session without climbing stairs, with the order randomized and counterbalanced. After each session came three cognitive assessments and six visual analog mood scales. The result: correct responses were faster after stair climbing. Mood was unchanged.

The finding did not arrive with the brain-blood-flow signal the team expected. Brain recording began about 20 minutes after the stair protocol, while researchers fitted the equipment. By then, influences on brain blood flow appeared to have dissipated. The equipment used NIRS—near-infrared spectroscopy—to measure brain hemodynamics, or blood-flow-related changes, leaving other mechanisms to explain why cognitive performance remained better.

So, concretely, students could use brief stair-climbing intervals during study sessions, while people with desk jobs could place them between periods of sitting. The appeal is logistical: the stairs may already be at home or work, making the activity easier to fold into an ordinary day. The study does not establish a lasting brain-health benefit, and its participants were young adults; it shows a short-term cognitive difference under controlled conditions.

Professor Liana Machado, the study’s lead author in the University of Otago’s Department of Psychology, said the team had expected blood-flow changes alongside the cognitive improvement. The next useful step is therefore not a larger promise, but a clearer explanation of what sustains the effect after the immediate exercise response has faded.