Elliptical machines are a funny thing. I’ve been on several of them, including my own which I love, the Horizon elliptical machine make, and they all vary in their usability. What I mean is that they vary in how hard they are to use, which means they are probably adjusted to different resistences to some degree, but it also has to do with how high quality of a machine you are working out with as well.

For instance, I went away this past weekend and found that the elliptical I used at another person’s house didn’t quite suit my needs, but not because the resistence was off or it was really difficult to use, but because it had a bracket that my shin bumped every time I came down with my right leg. Had I used that before I bought it, I would have looked for another model. This was one of the best brands of ellipticals (see reviews), it’s just that for me personally it didn’t work out as well as the Horizon does for me.

We paid around eight hundred dollars for our Horizon model elliptical, and I’ve given it rave reviews because it’s lived up to the high quality that one would expect from this brand, including the Horizon treadmills. In fact, I like it better than the ones I use at our fully equipped gym at my place of work, and that’s saying a lot because they have top notch brand names that are of gym quality at my workout facility at work.

The other thing you may want to be mindful of is the leg room. This one I used at a friend’s house seemed to make my knees go at almost a ninety degree angle, and the way I work out, I like for my legs to get more of a real skiing type of experience where the strides are long and drawn out, not like I’m riding a recumbent bike, because I think the two should be different experiences, and the one, the recumbent bike in my opinion, is more of a machine that might work out the quads, while the elliptical should lengthen the quads, almost like pilates does.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 12:51 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.