Treadmills

People either love treadmills or hate them. They call them hamster wheels or dread mills but for people with real winters, treadmills can be an great training tool. Even people with good weather year round can benefit for a session or two on a treadmill.

I run on a Precor 956 which has a set of preprogrammed workouts and I'm becoming a fan of the 2 minute interval workout. The workout alternates the pace and incline every two minutes. The base workout alternates between 0% incline for 2 minutes to 3% incline for 2 minutes.

My latest workout is 50 minutes long, 8 minutes to warm up, 32 minutes of hard inclines and then 10 minutes warm down. The warm up is 8 minutes long to give me to sets of inclines. 32 minutes gives me 8 sets of inclines and then the 10 minute warm down gives me 2 inclines to warm down followed by 2 minutes flat. Right now I'm breaking the 8 sets of inclines into 2 sets of 4 with each incline being slightly faster than the last in each group of 4. I think start again with the second set of 4.

So before you give up on the treadmill, look at the programs and try something different.