Cross Trainer MPH ?

recrecenter

Hello, does anyone know what a reasonable speed in MPH would be on an elliptical cross trainer ? Or a low, moderate and high intensity speed ?

spiriteagle99

That would depend on your level of fitness. Someone brand new to exercise would be breathing hard at a much lower speed than someone who has been exercising consistently for years. You'll need to experiment and see what speeds feel comfortable (so you can speak in whole sentences), and which make you feel like you are working harder.

AnnPT77

If you need an intensity level to guide training in order to improve fitness, RPE will work better than MPH in this scenario, for example:



If you need an intensity in order to use the MFP database to estimate exercise calories . . . well, I'd take the MFP number for elliptical with a grain or two of salt, honestly. But if there's no other alternative, I'd still use RPE, probably.

recrecenter

I had been focused on heart rate and duration alone. Then noticed an older woman maintaining a speed on the same cross trainer machine that was 2x my speed. Got me thinkiing...might someone with poor cardio health hop on a cross trainer, have their heart rate rapidly rise to target heart rate, maintain the target heart rate and mistakenly believe they're in good cardio condition by not considering speed ?

spiriteagle99

Speed isn't all that relevant to fitness. I know runners who are very fit, run 50+ miles a week year around and do a lot of cross-training, who have run numerous marathons and half marathons, who can't finish a marathon in less than 4.5-5 hours. Then there is the first time marathoner blessed with the right genes who finishes an hour or more ahead of them with minimal training.

AnnPT77

recrecenter wrote: »

I had been focused on heart rate and duration alone. Then noticed an older woman maintaining a speed on the same cross trainer machine that was 2x my speed. Got me thinkiing...might someone with poor cardio health hop on a cross trainer, have their heart rate rapidly rise to target heart rate, maintain the target heart rate and mistakenly believe they're in good cardio condition by not considering speed ?

To improve fitness (and cardio health), the main thing is to manageably challenge your personal capabilities, find the sweet spot where improvements occur without causing injury, burnout, counter-productive excess fatigue, and that sort of thing. All of that is n=1 individual, and it changes over time, i.e., as cardiovascular fitness improvements occur, one needs to increase the challenge (exercise duration, frequency, intensity, or type) in order to keep making further progress.

How "fast" someone else is going is irrelevant. (The elliptical machine is going nowhere, so any "speed" is imaginative. An elliptical doesn't really have a real-world analog for distance, exactly, even, so making that imaginative number be a little bit realistic is more difficult than for (say) a stationary bike.)

Let's talk about "target heart rate" for a moment.

If your "target heart rate" is based on an age-based estimate of maximum heart rate (HRmax), there's a pretty strong statistical probability that it's mis-estimated. Since HRmax is more genetic than trainable, that can be true even among people who are quite unfit. Unless you have a tested HRmax, the age estimates can be very approximate, potentially misleading. (A medical stress test doesn't necessarily give you a true HRmax, either. They may stop it when they get the data they need, short of actual HRmax.) Therefore, an age based target range can be very wrong, in reality.

Truly, in that sense RPE is a good thing, can be a better guide than raw heart rate, if you don't know your true HRmax. RPE gives you more personalized feedback than a potentially-incorrect heart rate beat per minute target.

If you're beginning, the best long term course - used in my sport, and even more sensible for health improvement/rehab - is to start by building base cardiovascular capability. That's normally done by doing a mildly challenging duration at very moderate intensity. Do that for a period of many weeks to months, either increasing duration/frequency to keep the challenge, or by gradually increasing intensity slightly (if you have a limited time budget for exercise) but keeping it steady state effort, or very moderate interval work (very easy, slightly harder alternating - not max effort hard intervals).

After reasonable base fitness in place, then you can think about adding more intensity. Even elite athletes don't do all high intensity all the time. High intensity is a condiment or side dish in the exercise menu, not a main meal. Yes, all those trendy articles online have a point: Including some higher intensity work in your overall plan is a good thing for health and fitness . . . once you're fit enough to handle it, and even then not all the time (even if the trendy articles encourage going ultra-hard daily from the beginning 🙄). Long term, the right mix of intensities depends on personal fitness goals: It will be different for an endurance athlete vs. a sprinter, for example.

Here's the thing about your "older woman": She's working out, we hope, to enhance her fitness and health. Maybe she's been working out for years, is pretty fit. Not just cardiovascular fitness matters in that performance, but also things like leg strength. Her "moderate intensity" speed may be "super high intensity" for a beginner. If there were ellipticals in the Olympics, probably an Olympic elliptical-er could get on an elliptical next to her, and go at twice her speed without even breathing hard. It doesn't matter. It's just fodder for gym gossip, at best. It would be more productive to pay attention to one's own workout and progress.

Intensity needs are individual. Intensity definitions are individual.

Your or my goal is to find the right challenge level for where we are now, in order to make progress. RPE is a good way to do that. Once we have base fitness in place, we can consider a submaximal or even maximal test for actual HRmax. It's too risky to do sooner. Once we have a better indication of true HRmax, ranges may still be useful, but even then RPE should work fine.

Another point: If the "target range" idea is going for the "fat burning zone" in order to optimize weight loss, that's also mythical. It's a thing we don't need to care about for weight loss: We only need to care about how many calories the exercise burns, and long-duration exercise at moderate intensity will burn the biggest number of them, for most people (as long as they have the happy time budget to do it).

High intensity exercise is self-limiting, in a sense: It's too exhausting to keep up for very long, so even if it burns lots of calories per minute, we can't roll up as big a total number of calories burned. Really, only endurance athletes need to worry about the "fat burning zone".

Our bodies utilize fuel substrates on a gradually-changing scale, as exercise intensity increases. Very mild exercise is more fat-fueled. (We burn the highest percentage of calories from fat while sleeping, it's just that it's a big percent of a very small number). Very intense exercise is more glycogen-fueled (carbohydrate-ish stuff stored in muscles/liver, basically). The proportions of each type of fueling change gradually as intensity increases, with fat burning gradually decreasing and glycogen fueling gradually increasing. The fat burning zone, loosely, is the relatively more intense area where fat is still a primary fuel source. Above that range, more and more fuel comes from the glycogen stores.

Why does that matter? Because the amount of glycogen in quick-access storage is limited, so we can't go at high intensity for very long.

Therefore, an endurance athlete - a marathon runner, say - needs to manage their pace and intra-race fueling to keep the quick-access glycogen stores topped up (so they use gels and other sugary stuff during races), manage their personal fat-burning zone (to use the slow-access fuel in a canny way) to go the distance without collapsing.

To a person pursuing weight loss, none of that matters. If calories are burned, and we don't supply all all those calories from food, stored body fat needs to be burned sooner or later to balance the books.

How do you know you're in good cardiovascular condition? Well, ask your doctor, for one. Beyond that, there are bunches of positive indicators: Your resting heart rate will tend to go down. You can go longer at the same speed or faster for the same duration, without being as fatigued or breathing as hard as formerly. If you have a fitness tracker device, it may give you rough estimates of various indicators ("fitness age", estimated VO2max, that sort of thing).

There is no exact "good cardiovascular condition", for most of us. If we want to, we can keep pursuing improvement. Can people delude themselves? Sure. But it has nothing to do with how fast the woman on the next elliptical is going. It has to do with that person not being canny about how to continue to challenge their personal current capabilities, and at the same time being willing to delude themselves about their current state being good enough.

If you have target heart rates given to you by a doctor for rehab reasons, follow your doctor's advice. If not, use RPE to make progress. It'll work fine.

recrecenter

I'm at "progressive pace" based on the scale. Started my cardio mission about 3 months ago. Goal was to increase energy levels. I've bumped up my (age-based) target heart rate from 95 to 130. And 130 is 80% max for me. More positives: I don't "crash" (sleep/feel exhausted) after exercise any more, much less muscle soreness and most importantly much more energy. Bought a Fitbit around 3 weeks ago and it claims my resting heart rate went from 62 to 53. Then got hung up on MPH a few days ago when I saw myself in slow-motion by comparison. I get what you guys are saying some people are gifted, some experienced, some extremely fit and that self improvement is the metric that counts.

AnnPT77

recrecenter wrote: »

I'm at "progressive pace" based on the scale. Started my cardio mission about 3 months ago. Goal was to increase energy levels. I've bumped up my (age-based) target heart rate from 95 to 130. And 130 is 80% max for me. More positives: I don't "crash" (sleep/feel exhausted) after exercise any more, much less muscle soreness and most importantly much more energy. Bought a Fitbit around 3 weeks ago and it claims my resting heart rate went from 62 to 53. Then got hung up on MPH a few days ago when I saw myself in slow-motion by comparison. I get what you guys are saying some people are gifted, some experienced, some extremely fit and that self improvement is the metric that counts.

Bingo!

One afterthought on my PP, after thinking it over on yesterday's bike ride: One way you can use the MPH effectively is to notice (on the same machine type) what HR correlates with a particular MPH and steady-state duration. (Like - say - being around 125bpm for 10 minutes at Xmph.) Then, repeat the workout a few weeks/months later, same duration/mph. If your HR during the same workout is lower than before, you're making progress.

Keep in mind, though, as a comment on your post I just quoted: If 130 is 80% max for you, based on an age-based HRmax estimate, but that HRmax estimate is wrong for you, then it isn't 80%.

Example: I'm 66, so by the simple 220-age estimating formula, my HRmax should be 154. In reality, it's somewhere in the vicinity of 180 (based on a test a few years back, plus more recent RPE indications). If I were working at 80% of the age-based HRmax estimate, I'd be going for 123bpm. My actual 80% is more like 144. That's a pretty big difference! The 154 that "should be" my max is only about 85% max. It I believed the 154 was HRmax, I'd be seriously undertraining, if I used HR as a guide rather than RPE. As I said, HRmax is more a matter of genetics than training.

The age-based estimating formulas for HRmax are incorrect for a reasonably high percentage of people, or to put it a different way, the standard error is pretty large. HRMax means pretty much nothing in itself, but if you use an incorrect estimate to derive training zones, and use those zones to structure your training, that can lead to under- or over-training.

recrecenter

"If your HR during the same workout is lower than before, you're making progress."

Speaking/RPE testing is looking better all the time-I like the idea of breaking out of age-based heart rate jail. But for now, I'm at 130bpm for 20 minutes. If I try to increase speed, heart rate jumps to 140/150ish. So I'll just need to be patient until I begin to see heart rate falling.

AnnPT77

recrecenter wrote: »

"If your HR during the same workout is lower than before, you're making progress."

Speaking/RPE testing is looking better all the time-I like the idea of breaking out of age-based heart rate jail. But for now, I'm at 130bpm for 20 minutes. If I try to increase speed, heart rate jumps to 140/150ish. So I'll just need to be patient until I begin to see heart rate falling.

How do you feel when your HR is 140/150 (like where are you on the RPE scale)?

Note that it's normal, in a non-brief but at least mildly challenging workout, that your heart rate will gradually increase as the time goes on in the workout, even without increasing pace. It's called "heart rate creep" or "cardiac drift" or variations on that theme. It's about things like your body trying to cool itself, or compensate for mild increases in dehydration from sweating.

If you've been working at moderate pace (like the 5-ish RPE) fairly consistently for 3 months, you may be at a point where you can consider doing an interval workout once a week or so, like doing an easy warmup, then doing a short time period of your 5-RPE (a minute or two), then a minute at a higher RPE, then back to RPE 5, repeating that alternation for a few intervals, then finish out with steady state as you've been doing, and cool down. It will be more fatiguing, so once a week to start, and keeping it a small number of higher intensity intervals to start, would be good. You can always increase next time, if it's manageable, not too fatiguing.

If you have any doubts about doing this (health history, for example), check in with your doctor.

FWIW, if 130bpm is estimated to be 80% max for you (based on age estimated HRmax), and it feels like RPE 5 when you hang out there, the rules of thumb about RPE correlation to HR would suggest that your estimated HRmax may be in the ballpark, IMO - not a sure thing, though.

recrecenter

I'm pretty much a novice. Spent 2 months on the stationary bike at first and then read that the cross trainer is a better machine/workout. So only been on the cross trainer for a month. Before that, never did the gym membership thing. Just loved being outdoors. Walked a lot. Live in the plains but found a few small hills to climb. Noticed when I'd invite a friend that they would quickly tire/run out of breath. So I took that to mean I'm in better cardio shape than people 10 years younger than me. Big mistake. Got on the health club stationary bike for the first time (20 minutes at 90bpm) and spent the next 3 days exhausted. For me, somehow walking, even walking hills just didn't translate to heart health.

AnnPT77

recrecenter wrote: »

I'm pretty much a novice. Spent 2 months on the stationary bike at first and then read that the cross trainer is a better machine/workout. So only been on the cross trainer for a month. Before that, never did the gym membership thing. Just loved being outdoors. Walked a lot. Live in the plains but found a few small hills to climb. Noticed when I'd invite a friend that they would quickly tire/run out of breath. So I took that to mean I'm in better cardio shape than people 10 years younger than me. Big mistake. Got on the health club stationary bike for the first time (20 minutes at 90bpm) and spent the next 3 days exhausted. For me, somehow walking, even walking hills just didn't translate to heart health.

Conditioning is somewhat activity specific. Being conditioned to one form of cardio doesn't automatically make you equally good or equally energetic at some other form: The different types require more than just performance from your cardiovascular system, or rather more than just the same parts of the CV system. There are different muscle groups involved in different CV exercises, for example. Sure, some of the heart/lung capabilities generalize across forms of cardio, but there's more to conditioning than that.

If you did better walking on hills than younger friends, you were better conditioned to that activity - and maybe more conditioned in a generalized cardiovascular sense - than those younger friends. All younger people aren't equally conditioned either, y'know? I can outdo some people 10 or even 20 years younger at my sport of choice, but not outdo every single person I know who's 10 or 20 years younger, and lots of people much older than me can certainly outdo me at CV exercises I'm not trained at (or am less trained at than they are).

Heart health is a factor, muscular strength (in various directions/places) is a factor, lung capacity, capability of the blood vessels at delivering energy to the specific muscles being used and carrying away waste products from them, and more. Different activities stress different parts of your body in different ways. Cardio exercise is not all one thing.

Give yourself some credit for being active, and for getting some benefits from that. But it's not realistic to expect high performance at (say) walking to immediately give you high performance at stationary biking or elliptical. Some carryover? Sure. But not total. Doing a new activity, trying to go equally as hard at it as at some different activity you've been doing for a while . . . you're going to experience some fatigue.

BTW, heart health (which is not the totality of cardiovascular health) is not some binary absolute end point that you either have or don't have. It's a continuum you evolve along: You get better as you continue to challenge yourself. There really is no "done". You get better faster at first, then more gradually later as you're squeezing out higher levels of accomplishment. You can keep improving for a long, long time . . . and you can keep fatiguing yourself if you extend far beyond then-current capabilities.

recrecenter

I have noticed a slowdown in average heart rate advances. 100bpm to 110bpm was a lot easier transition than 110 to 120. Will stick with 130bpm for a few weeks till it gets easier. Today the Fitbit (14 day wait) computed "personalized" heart rate zones. Says I can go up to 146bpm (85%). Looks like that number changes when resting heart rate changes. And found the VO2 Max you asked about-supposedly I'm in "excellent" cardio shape. But the VO2 Max fine print says for accuracy it wants GPS enabled. With GPS, it can incorporate my "pace".

AnnPT77

recrecenter wrote: »

I have noticed a slowdown in average heart rate advances. 100bpm to 110bpm was a lot easier transition than 110 to 120. Will stick with 130bpm for a few weeks till it gets easier. Today the Fitbit (14 day wait) computed "personalized" heart rate zones. Says I can go up to 146bpm (85%). Looks like that number changes when resting heart rate changes. And found the VO2 Max you asked about-supposedly I'm in "excellent" cardio shape. But the VO2 Max fine print says for accuracy it wants GPS enabled. With GPS, it can incorporate my "pace".

That sounds like a sensible plan. In theory - doctor clearance allowing, etc. - you can go up to your actual HRmax . . . you just can't stay there very long as a steady state, because your body Just Won't. There can be benefits of doing that a little bit as part of a training plan, but only (IMO/IMU) after developing decent base CV fitness.

As background, there are two ways of calculating heart rate percents.

One is just raw percent, i.e., take your HRmax estimate, multiply by the percent to get BPM.

The other is heart rate reserve method. That one does use HRrest, basically figuring out the difference between HRmax and HRrest, taking a percentage of that number, and adding it onto HRrest to get a bpm target.

Sounds like your device is using the HR reserve method. You get different results from basic vs. heart rate reserve methods.

IMU, actual HRmax doesn't change much, other than declining slowly with age . . . and maybe a bit more slowly among those who stay active. With heart rate reserve method, though - as you've found - the bpm that defines zones can change.

recrecenter

Much thanks for all the help !