Many seniors avoid climbing stairs. Maybe they shouldn’t.

Kerry Stewart has a long-running dispute with his wife when it comes to their two-story house outside Baltimore.

“I keep telling my wife I’m staying in my two-story house, and she keeps saying we should move to a one-story house,” Stewart says.

Stewart, a 78-year-old exercise physiologist at Johns Hopkins, believes that going up and down stairs helps keep seniors in shape, himself included.

He isn’t alone. Some research has found that seniors who climb more stairs have lower mortality rates and better retain their ability to do basic chores.

The various studies are mainly observational and could be skewed by confounding factors—people who are healthy for other reasons could use stairs more, for example. But they underscore that fitness isn’t only achieved at the gym or through formal workouts.

“You may go up the stairs in 10 or 15 seconds, but over the course of the day, that benefit accumulates,” says Stewart, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins. “People who maintain an active life, even at low levels, can accumulate a lot of benefit over time.”

Scientists once thought we had to exercise for 20 minutes or more at a time for cardiovascular fitness. That thinking has evolved. Little bits of exercise throughout the day may be just as beneficial. In some instances, it may be more beneficial in reducing cardiovascular risk factors.

This is borne out by research on walking. This study found that until age 60, mortality rates decline up to an average of between 8,000 and 10,000 steps a day. After age 60, mortality rates decline up to 6,000 to 8,000 steps a day. It didn’t matter if the steps were spread out over multiple sessions or clumped together in long walks, researchers told Barron’s.

Climbing stairs is a more intense exercise than walking, and that appears to confer its own benefits. Stairs don’t just improve your cardiovascular health; they build leg muscles and improve your balance.

Over the past century, everything from cars to the automation of daily household chores to online shopping has removed physical activity from our lives, says Bethany Barone Gibbs, who chairs the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the West Virginia University School of Public Health. “Getting a first-floor master bedroom is another way we have engineered physical activity out of our lives.”

She goes on. “A lot of European cities were built and designed before cars, and they’re much more walkable. And there’s also more infrastructure for biking and for more active transportation in general.”

Gibbs, who is a volunteer expert for the American Heart Association, says Americans should reengineer their lives to add more exercise by walking or taking stairs whenever possible, or even choosing to do their own shopping instead of online shopping. “Stairs are an awesome way to work activity back into our lives,” she says.

What about the risk of falling on stairs? Falling down stairs is a concern—particularly for seniors. But the risks may be relative.

Stairs equipped with rails, for example, pose less risk of falls to seniors than walking around the neighborhood, says Meera Sheffrin, a Stanford Medicine geriatrician. She says seniors sometimes fall because they don’t pick their feet up enough while walking, and they stumble over a rough spot. She says going up stairs builds the same leg muscles that help us walk correctly.

She loves the idea of stairs for seniors who can handle them. And she thinks it’s a good idea for seniors to have options without stairs as their health declines.

“It’s fine to buy a home with stairs if you’re in good health,” she says. “But I also recommend buying a home with a first-story bedroom and bathroom.”