The Elliptical And How To Use It For Fat Loss? Is It Better Than A Treadmill?

The Elliptical And How To Use It For Fat Loss? Is It Better Than A Treadmill? - Fitness Health

The elliptical is one of the most common and most used pieces of equipment available in all gyms and fitness centers. The elliptical is great to provide you with a full body workout, helping you burn calories, build muscles and work all your joints. It is also one of the best among all cardio machines that allow the user to get a steady-state, low-intensity workout.
Cardio is important to burn fat and lose weight as it gives the cardiovascular system a proper workout, forces your body to burn calories and use the stored fat. Although very common, the elliptical is widely misused by people who tend not to use it to its full potential. Mentioned below are the proper ways to use the elliptical in order to burn calories quickly.

The correct way to use the elliptical for fat loss

  • Increase speed and angle of the machine.

Although the low-impact nature of the machine is great for the working of your joints and back, you need to pick up speed to increase your calorie burn. Even a minute changes such as going for 4 mph to 4.5 mph can make a huge difference. The increase in speed will force your body to adapt resulting in increased metabolism, more calories burned and a greater fat activation. Similarly, maintaining a regular incline will not help much. Instead, increase the angle and the difficulty that will make your body work harder and burn fat stores.

  • Bring changes to the workout every now and then.

Doing the same workout every day will lead to your body adapting to it and no significant changes will be made. Instead, your body will become ‘rigid,’ and you will end up losing your mobility. Do different exercises in the machine such as HIIT one day and stair-climbing the next then, hill hike and sedentary walk the next. The more changes you introduce, the more your body will keep guessing and work harder that will eventually end up in the more fat burn.

  • Try High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)

HIIT burns a lot of both, calories and fat. Moreover, you can get great results in much lesser time as compared to steady-state cardio. The best way to HIIT is to mix up intervals. You can do this by first doing a short interval of 60-90 seconds of low-intensity exercise and then 30-60 seconds of full-intensity training. This kind of exercise is great to put your entire body to work and increase fat metabolism.

Elliptical vs. Treadmill

Both the elliptical and treadmill are very common machines found in all gyms and are inexpensive enough to be found in most homes as well.

When going for good cardio that works your cardiovascular system and helps lose weight, you need to find a machine that will put your entire body to work. For this reason alone the elliptical is the best. The handles of the elliptical provide resistance and challenge the upper body through pushing and pulling motions as because your feet never leave the pedals, it works your glutes and calves as well, providing a lower body workout as well. On the other hand, the treadmill is largely about running and works the muscles in your lower body, neglecting the upper body. This makes the treadmill less efficient in burning fat and calories as compared to the elliptical. Moreover, due to putting the entire body at work, the elliptical also helps build muscles.

Conclusion:

The elliptical is one of the best machines for good cardio as well as strength training. Properly using the machine can help you lose a lot of weight, quickly. However, it is important that you also maintain a healthy, balanced diet to see significant results.

 

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