Holding onto the treadmill????

Azdak

I only hold at 20 incline, walking at 4.0 to watch my heartrate spike a few minutes then lower and slow down.

As long as you aren't counting the calories, you can do whatever you think works. The downside of what you are doing is that you are setting a workload that is well beyond you physical capacity, and then offsetting the workload by holding on to lower it to something you can tolerate. It seems to me it would be a lot more straightforward to set the workload at the proper level in the first place. If wanted to walk at a really steep incline, you could leave it at 20%, and lower the speed to something you can do unassisted --say 3 mph, or even lower. Your heart rate will still increase to the same level and you would get balance and muscle conditioning at the same time. Win-win!

Unknown

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ninerbuff

Those of you who stated that you hold on because you feel you need to are demonstrating exactly why you shouldn't hold on. Your muscles are out of balance, due in large part to cheating in the first place. The more unbalanced you become, the more you will need to cheat. You're going to limit your progress, reduce the effectiveness of the exercise, and increase your risk of injury.

THIS. It's like lifting too much weight and sacrificing form for ego.

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