Ellipticals = A Chasing Of The Wind

If you have been reading my blog lately, then you know that I have been working out at least 4 days a week for a solid 2.5 months. My body has consequently been very angry at me for about 2 months. You would think it would celebrate my efforts to tone it up and make it run better, but there has been no celebration, only pain.

For the first 6-7 weeks I got into a consistent rhythm of 3 days of full cardio and 2 days of lifting with short bursts of cardio. I thought this would be a good system. A little over 50 % of my cardio workouts were spent on a treadmill and the rest was split between ellipticals, biking, and an arc trainer which is basically an elliptical stairmaster. After a few weeks, my knees were killing me. I’ve never had any problems with knee pains, and suddenly they we both causing me daily problems. I guess I’m getting old or something. I tried to look past it because I was progressing nicely. My times were getting faster and starting to look decent enough to say that I was in shape and I was losing about a pound a week. I wanted to be losing more than that, but I was simply unable to give up the foods I love for more weight loss. I cut out a bit of soda and had healthy lunches, but dinner was a different story, and weekends were just a mess. Despite all of that, I was fairly happy, except for my painful knees.

After complaining a little bit to Liz, she informed me that treadmills are normally bad on knees. I never knew. Despite the progress I was making, I knew I had to make a change. I kept the same schedule, but took out the treadmill and filled it with more time on the ellipticals. After about 3 weeks of non treadmill exercise, I am unhappy to say that I have been wasting my time. I try to work hard on these machines and keep my heart rate up, but the bottom line is: after 3 weeks I gained back most of the weight I had lost in the previous 7. How frustrating! Granted I had a couple of bad weekends of food in there, but not bad enough to make this much of a difference. Since nothing else has changed, I believe I can firmly say that ellipticals do not deliver anything near the same results as running on a treadmill. I really wish they did, because it doesn’t hurt as much and I rebound faster, but time on these machines has proved to be meaningless! Not only did I gain weight, but I am no where near as in shape as I was 3 weeks ago.

I have therefore decided to bear the knee pain and whatever else befalls me, and spend all of my cardio time on a treadmill. You may hear me by the end of this week from wherever you are wallowing and crying, but I think this is a necessary adjustment. I will update this in 2 weeks to see if my theory proved true and I get back down to where I weighed 3 weeks ago.

Wish me luck, and pray for my knees.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you take this lesson to heart if you start working out in a gym.