The treadmill is an excellent cardio machine because it can help increase your aerobic capacity and improve your fitness, but it is also ideal if you want to lose weight because just a 20-minute running workout at a decent pace can burn nearly 300 calories.
However there will often come a time when people find that they have reached a plateau and are struggling to lose any more weight.
So in this article I want to discuss five different ways you can burn more calories and lose more weight on the treadmill:
1. Increase The Length Of Your Workout
One of the most obvious things you can do to get more from your workout is to simply increase the duration of your workout. For example, if you regularly run at a steady pace for 20 minutes and are finding this fairly comfortable, you can start running for 30 minutes instead, which will burn 50% more calories.
2. Increase The Speed
Another way to burn more calories is to keep the length of your workout the same, but increase the speed instead. Alternatively, if you want to burn even more fat, you can gradually increase the speed throughout your workout so that it gets harder and harder because this will present a tough challenge, and will really push you to the limit.
3. Increase The Incline
If you are using a treadmill that has variable incline settings, you also have the option of increasing the incline to mimic walking or running uphill. Most people prefer to stick to the flat when using a treadmill, but by using one of these incline settings you can make your workout a lot harder, and will subsequently burn more calories as a result.
4. Introduce High Intensity Interval Training
If you really want to put your body into maximum fat-burning mode, you should seriously consider introducing high intensity interval training into your workouts because this has been proven to burn a lot more calories than a conventional treadmill workout.
Short periods of intense exercise are the key here, so one option is to walk or run at a gentle pace for two minutes, then run at a much more vigorous pace (or on an incline) for one minute, and then repeat this for ten rounds or until the end of your workout.
5. Finish With A Warm-Down
Finally, there is one simply way to burn a few more calories when using a treadmill, and that’s to have a short warm-down session at the end of your workout. Lots of people will run at the same pace for 20 or 30 minutes, and then simply stop when they have got to the end of their workout because they are desperate for it to end.
However by dropping the speed right down and walking at a gentle pace for a further 10 minutes, for example, you can easily burn a few extra calories with very little effort, and you should also find that this is quite a good way to warm down.
Leave a Reply