I was at the gym where I work (I’m lucky enough to have a great gym facility where I work), and a gym worker was giving a new member a tour of the gym. She had stopped at the elliptical machines and was answering the new patrons questions about how to operate the piece of machinery, when I thought “wow, I never even thought about how confused I was when I first tried one of these machines”. It’s like the old saying about riding bikes, once you know you never forget, even though learning seemed hard at the time.

Elliptical machines mostly operate on pretty much the same type of system, except the user interface and various controls and features usually vary per the model and make you have. The better models will typically have more options to choose from when it comes to picking programs like up and down hills, cardio, endurance, and manual. Every one of them though, has a manual program, and most will have a control that you can dictate the amount of incline you want to be on, or high high of a grade you want to be stepping on.

They usually all have a resistence adjustment as well. So, if you’re a beginner, you usually will choose the lowest resistence - say a number one, and if you’re more advanced, like I am now, you might choose a 5,6 or 7. I know when many people first start out on ellipticals, they find them very hard to do much time on. Trust me, if you stick to it, in no time you will find an elliptical a much better option than most treadmills, because of the fluidity of motion and more options on how to work out the whole leg, not just the quad and the calves.

Some of the best ellipticals now today that can be purchased for home use, and are just as good as anything you’d get on at the gym are reviewed here on our special elliptical machine reviews page. There are so many out there, and there are some really sub-par ones, it is really worth it to purchase a good one though - they are more stable and provide a much better, more worry free workout than one that is rickety or doesn’t work at the right resistence levels.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Elliptical Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.