Up and down make different workouts
By Ben Harder
From New Orleans, at a meeting of the American Heart Association
Hiking on a mountainside gives the heart a health-promoting challenge, but the nature of the benefit depends on whether one is climbing or descending. A study conducted on an Alpine mountainside suggests that going up improves the body’s processing certain fats, while going down enhances metabolism of a key sugar.
For 2 months of the study, 45 healthy but generally inactive volunteers spent 3 to 5 hours per week scaling the 30-degree slope of a mountain near Feldkirch, Austria, and rode a cable car back down. During a separate 2-month period, they rode up but descended on foot.