Using the treadmill

• This is the one equipment that is most abused by gym enthusiasts who do not know how to get the best results from it

The health and fitness industry is notoriously fickle in its short-lived courtship with various workout fads. When I was starting out, over a decade ago, high impact aerobics was all the rage thanks to Jane Fonda.

Step aerobics classes had a fanatical following and everyone wore luminous leotards and leg warmers. Years later, Billy Blanks made Tae-Bo a household name and had everyone from business executives to housewives throwing upper cuts, straight jabs and left hooks.

Today, it is cool to carry around a yoga mat and sip water from environmentally-friendly water bottles, made from recycled metal.

Through the decades, the only thing I can think of that has endured this capricious relationship has been the treadmill.

Walk into any health club anywhere in the world today, and I guarantee you will find a row of treadmills somewhere in the Cardio room.

So popular is this piece of equipment that a gym cannot truly claim to be one without it and many people feel that a work-out is incomplete without a stint on the treadmill.

All this is very interesting when you consider the fact that the treadmill when it was first invented by one Sir William Cubitt in the 1800s, was designed as a tool for the ‘reform’ of prison inmates – a euphemism for torture.

Over time, treadmills have become much more sophisticated and today, your average health club treadmill is capable of providing you with a lot of information to help you fine tune your work-out.

One important piece of information most modern treadmills give you is your heart rate.

Basically, your heart pumps blood around your body, and that blood contains oxygen, which the body combines with fat to yield energy in a process known as glycolysis.

It follows logically, therefore, that in order to burn the most fat, you need to keep your heart rate high for at least 20 to 30 minutes at a time and most modern day treadmills give you several variables to play with.

The most obvious of these is the Speed function. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if you move faster, you burn more calories, but this speed comes with a huge caveat stamped on its face.

The down-side to speed is that you also incur more impact to your joints, a fact that can be particularly detrimental to heavier people over time. A smart way to get around the problem is to use other variables.

The incline function on a treadmill elevates the machine so that it mimic’s climbing a hill. Naturally, this can lend some serious intensity to your work-out, even at slower speeds, but it is also the function that many of us abuse the most.

I am sure we are all conversant with the image of those people in the gym who get the incline so high and then cling on to the railings for dear life.