The Benefits Of Elliptical Trainers

Elliptical trainers are one of the most diverse home cardio machines you can buy. They engage both your arms and your legs, they can be used in both a forward and reverse motion and they provide you with a combination of cardio and resistance training. In this article I’m going to be expanding on what makes elliptical trainers such a good piece of home workout equipment and discussing five of their main benefits.

1) Full Body Workout

The most notable benefit of elliptical trainers is that they give you a full upper and lower body workout at the same time. Unlike exercise bikes, steppers and treadmills which only target your lower body and don’t engage your upper body at all, elliptical trainers target your upper body with their rotating arms and your lower body with their rotating pedals.

The best part is that you can use this unique design to get a range of different results. If you want to strengthen and tone your arms, back and chest, you can let your upper body do most the work. Alternatively, if you want to build up your legs, you can let go of the rotating arms and work the machine solely with your feet. If you want to strengthen and tone your upper and lower body equally, you simply let your arms and legs do equal amounts of pushing.

2) Dual Motion

Another unique benefit of buying an elliptical trainer is that the dual motion allows you to target different muscles by simply changing direction. If you glide forward, you target your hamstrings, triceps and chest whereas if you glide backwards you target your quadriceps, biceps and upper back.

You can also focus on just chest your chest and triceps by gliding forward and letting your arms do most of the work, just your hamstrings by gliding forward and letting your legs do the work, just your biceps and upper back by gliding backwards and letting your arms do most of the work or just your quadriceps by gliding backwards and letting your legs do most of the work.

No other cardio machines allow you to target the major muscles in your upper and lower body this specifically and if you really want to focus on developing individual muscles, it’s a great feature to have.

3) Zero Impact Cardio

If you find running on a treadmill causes pain in your ankles, knees or hips, elliptical trainers are a fantastic zero impact alternative. Unlike treadmills which place pressure on your joints with every step you take, elliptical trainers guide your feet through the motions using a rotating platform. As a result, your feet never leave the platform and no pressure is ever applied to your joints. This means you still get a good workout but without any pain or pressure in your ankles, knees or hips.

4) High Calorie Burn

In terms of calories burned, elliptical trainers are the third most efficient home cardio machine on the market after treadmills (which burn 825 calories per hour when jogging at 10kph) and steppers (which burn 735 calories per hour when stepping at a moderate pace). Just one hour of moderate exercise on an elliptical trainer burns through a notable 679 calories which is over 100 calories more than one hour of moderate cycling on an exercise bike or one hour of moderate rowing on a rowing machine.

While burning an extra 100 calories a day may not sound like a huge amount, if you exercised for an hour every day it would equate to losing an extra 14 ounces of weight each month and an extra 10.4 pounds of weight over the year. When you consider that this is in addition to the weight you’d lose from cycling or rowing, it’s quite an impressive figure, especially if weight loss is one of your main goals.

5) Low Maintenance

One final benefit of elliptical trainers compared with other home cardio machines is that they are relatively easy to maintain. This is because elliptical trainers don’t have very many moving parts, so there are fewer points where they can actually break. In addition to this, the smooth, low impact, gliding motion of elliptical trainers places very little pressure on the moving parts and because of this they last a lot longer than the moving parts in other cardio machines.

Summary

If you’re looking for a home workout machine that gives you a varied, full body workout and combines cardio with resistance training, you can’t go wrong with an elliptical trainer. It’s the only cardio machine on the market that allows you to target specific muscles while also burning an impressive number of calories at the same time. So if the elliptical trainer sounds like the perfect cardio machine for you, get online and get shopping for one right now.