How to get the most effective workout on your home elliptical

The great thing about the elliptical is that it is an easy-to-use piece of equipment giving you a low impact but effective workout, that will improve your fitness in the comfort of your own home. Although the elliptical may be one machine with one motion, there are many ways to vary an elliptical workout. This includes changing resistance, speed, direction, and body position.

Some of the many benefits of the elliptical is that there is less impact on the joints, it improves blood flow, increases cardiovascular fitness and reduces stress levels. The resistance on the elliptical enables you to get enough load to improve muscular strength and endurance, targeting the glutes, quads, hamstrings and core. Decreasing the resistance will increase the speed and focus more on improving heart and lung capacity resulting in a strengthened cardiovascular system.

You can discover many ways to target different muscle groups by adjusting the body position, making the workout fun, and varied. The elliptical is not just a leg focused workout. By taking the resistance away in the legs you can target the biceps, triceps and back with the push and pull movement on the handlebars. There are also a variety of ways to target the leg muscles deeper, for example by adapting the standing stance, bending at the knees and driving the hips back as if going into a squat position. A great way to focus on core stability is to loosen the grip on the handlebars. For those who are intermediate or advanced, go hands free and really challenge your balance once you feel safe to do so. You can even have fun using directional change by going backwards; challenging your coordination as well as improving muscle strength. All in all the elliptical is not just a great piece of kit to improve your cardiovascular fitness, but a great tool to improve strength and endurance.

Although the elliptical is easy to use, it is important to still think about form in order to get the best out of the exercise and move safely. Ensure you use the handles but without leaning the body weight forward on to them. Avoid standing on your toes and push heels down on to the plates, and always keep your core braced to help stabilise you.

With all of life’s responsibilities and obstacles, it is not always easy to stay motivated or consistent with training. Sometimes finding the time can be a factor to not fit in a workout. Even if you don’t have the time, you can still do a very short but effective training session. Even as little as 15 minutes of varied intervals or steady state cardio can get the heart rate pumping and calories burning. With this piece of kit in the home it is saving travel time to the gym, making it that little bit easier to fit in your workout on those busy days.  

Finding something that will help keep you active and that you can enjoy doing will support your fitness journey. The features on the elliptical give you different programme options to add structure to your training regime, which will support you in staying consistent and avoiding hitting a plateau. There is no time to get bored on the elliptical with not only effective programming, but entertainment features too that can help keep you going.

In conclusion the elliptical is an efficient way to get your cardio and conditioning workout in at home for maximum results on an easy-to-use piece of equipment!