Researchers at one Canadian hospital found that when they had doctors take the stairs instead of the elevator, it saved each an average of 15 minutes out of the workday.

In general, experts recommend that people find ways to add "incidental" exercise to their daily lives. That includes small steps like parking farther away from your destination and bypassing the elevator in favour of the stairs.

But many people habitually head straight for the elevator, noted Dr Thomas Wilson, the senior researcher on the new study. And the assumption that it saves time may be one reason.

So Wilson and his colleagues at the Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, put that idea to the test by recruiting four doctors at their centre.

They measured the time it took each doctor to make 14 different trips on the hospital stairs -- walking, not running -- and to make those same trips via elevator (at different points of the weekday and weekend). The longest journey ran from the ground floor to the sixth floor.

It turned out that the doctors were much quicker than the elevators.

On average, it took them 13 seconds to climb one floor, whereas the elevator took about 37 seconds. All 14 stairway trips took a grand total of 10 minutes, on average. The time by elevator averaged 20 to 25 minutes.

Dr Philippe Meyer, a cardiologist at the University Hospital of Geneva in Switzerland, agreed that time-saving might motivate workers who have to travel up and down a few flights of stairs.

As for the health effects of stair-climbing, not much research has been done. But in a study published last year, Meyer found that encouraging sedentary workers at his hospital to take the stairs had some tangible benefits.

After 12 weeks, those workers were climbing an average of almost 21 flights per day, versus 4.5 before the stair-climbing campaign.

And with those extra steps came small dips in waist size, body fat, blood pressure and "bad" LDL cholesterol.

But that did require climbing about 20 stories in a day, Meyer pointed out -- which is more than most of us would do in our normal daily routine.

So even if you opt for the stairs when you get to the office, you'll probably need to find other ways to exercise as well.