New Treadmill

Try running/jogging intervals - 1 minute walk, 1 minute run. Also, walk at a good clip at an incline and you'll get a good workout - much better than walking level.

When you walk at an incline, it should be like climbing a hill; you want to kind of lean your body into it. I see lots of people walking too fast at too high of an incline & they have to hold onto the rails to stay on & keep up their speed. This keeps their body perpendicular to the treadmill and completely defeats the purpose of walking at an incline. When you're walking at an incline, you're lifting more of your body weight for each step you take (think stair-climber) and so it works your muscles better.

I like to walk 1/10 of a mile, and then run 1/10 of a mile. You can also listen to music and change the pace up at the end of each song; run during the chorus; etc to keep things interesting (if you listen to music while you workout.) The timed intervals are also good. Just play mind games and say you'll run for so long or walk for so long. I used to HATE being on the treadmill until I started doing these things and listening to my ipod. Now it seems like an hour passes my quicker on my treadmill than with any of my other workouts!

I have a treadmill and there are all kinds of things you can do. I have had to cut (way) back on it the last couple of months because of an injury, and I miss it a lot.

At first, I was just doing a walk/run routine because I couldn't do a sustained run. I probably started with 2 min walk, 1 min run. Once I got up to 4 min run, 1 min walk then I started doing more structured workouts to keep track of progress. Once I got up to 25 total running minutes, I started increasing the run intervals. One day I decided to just go for it and increased the running from 8 min to 15, then walked for 3 or 4 min and found I could do another 15. That was the breakthrough.

While I was doing this I was also doing longer incline walking workouts just to burn calories. I decided that, instead of watching TV on the couch, I would watch it walking on the treadmill. I figured if I did it long enough, even at a slow speed, it be an extra 300-500 Calories. Of course, I couldn't keep it that slow, and ended up taking the elevation way up so that I was burning almost as many calories in a hour as running. Wasn't exactly relaxed, but it was effective.

As I worked up to "normal" running durations, I settled into 3 types of workouts: Long, slow distance, keeping intensity relatively low but pushing the minutes, medium runs either at a continuous "tempo" speed or using a random hill profile at a somewhat slower and more varied speed; and shorter, high-intensity interval runs of various combinations or simulated races. The pattern was 1 LSD, 2 Tempos, 1 Interval per week. In addition I have a stairclimber and I use a cross trainer at the park district when I do weights.