Who else is older and has BAD KNEES?

swimming is good for bad knees.

The elliptical is fantastic, my knees have been bothering me for years but this machines makes me feel no pain whatsoever. I also heard swimming is good, don't know because I can't swim...LOL

Even if you do the same things, change the levels and intensities. I change the programs, workout with more or less resistance, and challenge myself with speed. In essence, do intervals on whatever machine you have so your body doesn't know what's coming. The issues is when you do the same workout over and over, not necessarily using the same machine.

Also, bike of course.

I haven't lost enough weight to run again yet and jogging is hard on my knees. I also developed some random knee pains. This is what is working for me.

HTH!

And I'd be very careful with Jillian Michaels videos! She HATES knees, I swear.

She ABSOLUTELY hates knees.

And I'd be very careful with Jillian Michaels videos! She HATES knees, I swear.

She ABSOLUTELY hates knees.

oh no! I just bought her video today! :ohwell:

I am trying to get myself in shape, but I often run afoul of the fact that my knees leave a WHOLE LOT to be desired. What do other people do for high-efficiency workouts with bad knees? I use my elliptical, but I know that not changing your routine gets your body to be super-efficient with that one exercise. How do others do protracted cardio, interval training, etc., when their knees start to complain?

First of all the idea that "efficiency" will hurt your routine is mostly hooey. I don't know where the idea came from, but it's a misunderstanding of how the body works.

You can vary your training stimulus without changing machines. Cross training can be helpful for addressing muscle imbalances and decreasing the risk of overtraining, but it's not necessary for weight loss.

Mix up the duration and intensity of your workouts. Include longer endurance workouts, shorter continuous "higher tempo" workouts and various types of interval workouts.

I don't know the nature of your "bad knees" but often chronic joint problems develop because of muscle weakness, balance issues, or insufficiently rehabbed injuries.

I have severe chondromalacia, which is basically pre-arthritis. I can do most things, but I wear a brace on my left knee, and will probably need another on my right eventually.

I'm not really "older", but my left knee is shot! Bumping for workout ideas!!!

First of all the idea that "efficiency" will hurt your routine is mostly hooey. I don't know where the idea came from, but it's a misunderstanding of how the body works.

Is it hooey, or is it over-generalized? If I start a new exercise and do it for 20 minutes, and my heart rate is at 170 for most of the workout, aren't I burning more calories than I am when, 2 months later, I can maintain the same rate/intensity for the same period of time with my heart rate at 152?

I certainly raise the resistance (and go backwards) and speed. My goal is generally to maintain aconsistent level of effort (preferably as measured by a heart rate monitor), or to vary it (as measured by the same), but after a while, it certainly seems like the results change (decrease).

The problem is that, using an HRM as the standard, you are mistaking RELATIVE intensity for ABSOLUTE intensity. And you are assuming that HRMs measure calories when in fact they only measure heart rate--the calorie numbers they show are indirectly derived from algorithms based on the HR measurement.

At any given intensity, an aerobic activity has a relatively fixed energy cost. That energy cost does not change when your fitness level improves. What happens is that, because of exercise training, your MAXIMUM fitness level increases. Therefore, the fixed energy cost is now a LOWER percentage of your maximum. Because it is a lower percentage of your maximum, it feels easier.

And since max HR doesn't change, and since the workload now represents a lower percentage of maximum, the heart rate will be lower.

People assume that because heart rate is lower, calorie burn is lower. In fact, the error comes from the fact that the HRM does not recognize that your fitness level has improved and so it is working off of an outdated scale, so to speak.

The other confounding factor is that, as people improve their fitness level, they often lose weight. Now in that case, yes you will burn fewer calories--but not because of "efficiency" . It's because you weigh less.

So in answer to your original question, if weight has not changed, then YES you are burning roughly the same calories at a heart rate of 152 as you did at 170 weeks earlier, assuming that the workload is exactly the same. In some of the older Polar models (F6, F11) you could manually update your VO2max and "recalibrate" the scale. The newer models use different algorithms, so I don't know how they account for increases in fitness anymore.

Mechanical efficiency can be a factor long-term, but it probably only would account for a 3%-5% decrease and it would take a lot longer than a couple of months to see that change.

Keep in mind this has nothing to do with varying your training intensity--i.e. including easy, medium and hard workouts in your routine. Varying your intensity and duration are bedrock principles of fitness training. But they are necessary to improve fitness and endurance, not to "confuse" the body into burning more calories.