The elliptical is a great low-impact machine found at practically every gym. Sure, it's a great option. But pedaling away at the same pace every time can get insanely boring—and doing the same motion over and over isn't an effective way to improve your fitness or lose weight.
The elliptical is a cardio machine, so its biggest benefits are improving your cardiovascular health and burning calories. But to see both of those things, you need to constantly challenge your body in new ways. "Variation is super important in your workouts so that your body is always adapting and getting stronger," Lindsey Corak, trainer at Life Time Athletic Boston Metro West, tells SELF.
Over time, your heart adapts to the demands being put on it by pumping more blood, allowing your muscles to get more oxygen, faster. These changes make your heart stronger and better equipped to handle a bigger workload, like more vigorous exercise. These changes are what improve your ability to perform when it comes to tasks, like running or HIIT workouts, that demand an efficient, strong heart.
There are some simple ways to change up your elliptical workout so your body gets that extra challenge it needs to incite change. You can do this by increasing the incline or varying the speed. Each of these raises the intensity of the workout, Corak says. Plus, when you throw intervals of lower and higher intensity into the mix, you're keeping your heart guessing, and making it constantly work hard to keep up with the changes.
If burning calories is your goal, increasing intensity is the best way to do it efficiently. The harder you're working, the more oxygen your body has to consume. The higher your oxygen consumption, the higher the MET, or metabolic equivalent, of the workout. A higher MET = more energy used, which means more calories burned. Exact caloric burn varies from person to person, and burning calories isn't even a workout goal for everyone—there are so many great reasons to work out besides burning calories—but if you're trying to burn more, turning up the intensity is a good method.
We talked to three fitness experts about ways to really feel the burn on the elliptical, and worked with them to create 10 new workouts. Each one has a slightly different focus, from hills to sprints to total body, and vary in length from 10 to 20 minutes. They all involve changes in incline, resistance, and intensity, to maximize your time on the machine.
Allison Berry, a personal trainer at Crunch, created this workout based off keeping the incline set at nine the whole time, and then she mixed in a combo of forward and backward leg rotations. So first your legs will move counter-clockwise and then clockwise. "You work the lower body muscles and core very thoroughly. And the middle section of 'no-hands' adds a little extra lower body emphasis," Berry tells SELF.
"This workout runs the gamut of inclines and resistances on the elliptical, so that by the time you are done you will have gone through a broad spectrum of effort levels," Berry says. Every three minutes your resistance and incline level will change, until you work all the way up to 15 percent incline. You'll be sure to feel the backs of your legs tomorrow.
This 20-minute high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workout from Cindy Lai, trainer at Cindy Lai Fitness and Forte Trainer, involves a mix of high and low intensities to really challenge your heart. HIIT workouts involve alternating between quick, intense bursts of exercise and short, low-intensity recovery periods. The goal of this type of training is to get your heart rate up quickly and maximize calorie burn in these brief periods of super intense work.
Lai's workout follows this formula: 20 seconds on (or hard), 10 seconds off (or easy). Those easy recovery intervals are key to prep your body for the intense work. Plus, the constant change in heart rate really forces your heart to adapt.
This 15-minute workout from Rachel Mariotti, Tier III and Personal Trainer + Precision Running Coach at Equinox, focuses on your strokes per minute, which is a measure of how quickly your feet are rotating. Set your incline for 5 percent and then do three rounds of alternating resistance followed by a minute of recovery as needed. Feel free to add a longer warm-up and cool-down to this if you need it.
In the warm-up, you can alternate between forward and backward pedaling to get your body ready to go both directions. And for each "hands off" component, pretend like you're running and swing your arms by your sides, this way you have use your core to stay balanced, Lai says.
Jump on the elliptical and take on this 17-minute routine from Steven Bronston, trainer at Life Time Fitness. If these levels feel too easy, feel free to play around with them. Increase the level to whatever you feel comfortable with, while still being challenged, Bronston says.
Try starting at 3 and jumping to 5, or starting at 4 and jumping to 6. Every number should increase the same amount, so you still have the ups and downs of levels. With each jump up, you should feel the difficulty increase, and then with every regression, you should feel the difficulty level go down, so you can recover.
For this 30-minute workout from Mariotti, you can set the incline at five for the whole routine. You'll work your way through three sets of sprints. If you feel the need to add a challenge, try to just use your legs during the recovery periods.
You'll push and pull your way through a series of levels in both forward and backward pedal directions in this 25-minute workout from Bronston. Backward motion might prove to be more difficult than forward, so remember to use both your arms and legs, he says.
Set the incline at three for this, but feel free to increase it if you feel super strong on this 20-minute workout created by Mariotti. Remember to push and pull with your arms during the sprints. And again, take a longer warm-up and cool-down if you need it.
For this workout, you'll repeat a series of one-minute pushes focusing on first your upper body, then lower, and finally, total body. When you push from your upper body, you'll drive the motion with your arms. When you push from your lower body, you'll drive from your legs. After you warm up and test out pushing from both your upper and lower body, Bronston recommends setting the elliptical at a level that's challenging for your upper body and keeping it there. It's likely easier to push from your legs (your body's bigger muscles are there), so when you're challenging your arms it might feel a bit easier on your legs—that's totally OK.
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