In fitness cardio workout is an important key element. There is no sport or activity that does not require the need of a cardio workout. Most common of all cardio exercises is running which provides the body with improved blood circulation, trained breathing lungs and stronger muscle.

Now, not every small town or city has the terrain good running mileage. Running can be quite boring when you run in circles on a football court. Interesting form of running is from one place to another without the need to make circles.

To compensate on running when the weather is not on your side, there are fitness equipment that gives the same exercise results as running in the comfort of your own home; The Treadmill and an Elliptical fitness machine.

What is the difference? First of all, lets make a note that both of the machines are perfect for fitness exercising, They both are able to make the body sweat as if you are running in the park. Sweating means that body workout is ‘on the right track’; blood circulation speeds up, lungs are practiced for better breathing, normalizing heart rate, and etc.

The difference is obvious: Elliptical fitness machines lynch the pain in your joints and ankles that you probably get while running. When on a treadmill, and when running classical style, knees and joints are experiencing impact every time the foot touches the ground. These impacts are quite small in the beginning, but after 10 minutes of running they seriously affect the stamina of your body.

Elliptical machines don’t make this kind of problem. They are designed to rotate the legs in the same manner as when running, without a foot impact on the ground. The feet remain stationary positioned on the pedals and make elliptical rotations.

Balance on the elliptical machine is maintained with two handles for the hands that move forward and backwards along with the movement of the legs. This is the difference between the elliptical machine and the treadmill; the elliptical machine includes the hands in the workout, while in running hands have no role.

But a good thing about a treadmill is that there is an option on it allowing you to lift the treadmill a little higher; simulating running uphill. This type of running is advanced in character and puts more pressure on the thigh muscles giving it more power.

The choice on which machine is better varies from athlete to athlete. Treadmills gives more strength and is much more challenging with the cost of joint pains; the elliptical machine is more for cardio workout excluding any pain in the joints or knees.

Can you tell I hate my saddle bag problem!? Well, I was working out as I said on the elliptical machine, and I positioned my feet so that it looked like I was sort of walking like a duck, with my toes pointing outward, and as I pumped the pedals on the machine, my knees were also sort of pointed out to the left and right sides of the room I was in.

This actually targets the outer thighs better, because you are turning the work inward from your quadriceps muscles, which get pretty big on me if I don’t watch it and work them too much anyways. This motion allows you to specifically target the thighs and the saddle bag area and tone it. I also make sure I turn the tension way up on the machine, maybe to about a ten or twelve tension setting, depending on what your fitness and muscular strength level is.

Turning up the resistance and simultaneously pointing your feet outward are key to get those outer thighs working and toned up more, so that you can begin to see a difference in their size shrink down a bit (diet always helps too on this stubborn part of a woman’s body), because you are pulling them in by working those outer thigh muscles.

I love this exercise now. I usually do it for about 3-5 minutes at the end of my elliptical workout so I can get the extra toning benefit at the end and that also serves as a cool down for my heart rate since I’m moving slower, but still toning the muscles, which is a great combo for fat reduction.

I’ve had my Horizon elliptical for a few years now and couldn’t be happier with it. It’s required no maintenance whatsoever, and I feel like I get the exact same workout as I did when I was working out on a piece of gym equipment that probably costs thousands more. I can guarantee that, like last Chirstmas and the Christmas before, ellipticals will be big sellers.

People love them because they offer a great, intense workout, without any roughness on the joints like some other types of equipment can give, and they also have a reputation for giving ladies the longer, leaner muscles that they want instead of bulking them up because they don’t jolt the muscles and target just one area when they are working out the leg and thigh muscles.

It also strikes me that when I do go to the gym, there are eight elliptical machines, that’s right eight, and you ALWAYS have to fight to get on one, even if the rest of the machines in the gym are empty, this proves that people really like them once they use them and prefer them to add what they need to their workout without adding extra stress to the joints and working out all the wrong parts that they want to get smaller, not bigger.

My personal reason for liking the elliptical machine best out of all the cardio equipment I’ve used is that I have worked up to a point where a half hour is the perfect amount of exercise on one, and I’ve noticed that it’s helped to sculpt down my thighs – my biggest problem area – the quickest out of the treadmill, the recumbent bike and other similar contraptions.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing at all! It’s just that, you know what I’m talking about if you work out regularly, it’s almost like you crave it and feel like a giant crabapple if you don’t get it. Which is good! God knows that those who never really got into working out should feel like garbage when they don’t get exercise, but many people don’t even realize what they’re missing out on or why they feel bad, simply because they don’t correlate the two.

Enough with my soapbox folks. My point is, I went to the gym after a break, and found that there were new elliptical trainers, at least I had never noticed them before (disclaimer, I am the queen of oblivion sometimes). So, I decided to hop on one of the new elliptical machines and noticed that after only five minutes I was breathing harder than I normally do with my elliptical workouts, and that I had to actually turn down the resistence so that I could finish my normal 30 minute workout.

I was actually sweating very badly in a highly air conditioned gym that gave me goosebumps when I first walked in – a sign of worsening circulation, probably exacerbated by me not working out for several days. I noticed when I was done that my bangs had actually gotten soaked, something that doesn’t usually happen both because I have them secured and because on the older elliptical machines in the gym I normally did not exert myself so much. You see, the older they get, the less resistant they get, so you just have to start cranking up the resistance on them – no biggie.

There’s also another big reason I love our Horizon elliptical though, and that is that I can easily go backwards on it and help shape and tone by buttocks, which of course can always use all the help it can get since I’m a woman and the butt is the most frequent area of fat deposits, followed by the thighs and the upper arms, oh yeah and then the abs, but that is probably where I have the least problems so far at this point in my life (by the way I’m in my early thirties).

What I do it stop using the moving arms of the elliptical machine, and begin to instead go backwards, which tends to feel a little more like you are working the buttocks instead of the fronts of the legs and the quadricep muscles, which is a concern for most women that these muscles will get bigger, not something that many non body building women tend to want to happen.

The way I do it is in intervals, doing about eight minutes of forward movement with my arms moving on the moving arm extensions, and then I take a two minute backwards jaunt, really focusing on squeezing those buttocks muscles so that I can get the most out of it, and believe me, I’m watching the clock still too because although you stop using your arms and maybe the cardio intensity isn’t as high, the muscle work is still hard and requires concentration and focus, just a different kind.

I have found that differentiating my elliptical workout like this by going backwards has indeed helped to lift and shape my butt, so I continue to do it in intervals of eight minutes followed by the two going backwards, and I usually stay on the elliptical machine for a total of about thirty minutes, so it amounts to a total of about 6 minutes going backwards, but it changes it up often enough so you are not totally exhausting the muscles of the butt, however you are creating muscle confusion which is one of the best ways to tone and burn fat.

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.