An Elliptical Cross Trainer: Is It Worth Your Money?

An elliptical trainer, also called a cross trainer, is a fitness exercise equipment for large muscle groups. It works both your lower body and your arms, providing a no-impact exercise method. Using it regularly, you should be able to increase your fitness level and burn fat.

Ellipticals have become very popular in recent years as the ‘home cardiovascular equipment of choice’, but are they really worth it?

Image via Wikipedia

Lose Weight, Get Fitter

The top reason quoted for buying a home exercise machine is – losing weight. This seems to be the reason why most of us exercise at all – burning off the extra calories we consume every day. There is a secondary reason which goes hand in hand with losing weight – getting fitter or increasing our cardiovascular level.

The workout provided by the cross trainer has the potential to deliver the goods with both of these. However, it is up to you to realize this potential.

The Elliptical Cross Trainer Advantages Over Running

1. You can work out for longer

Working out on an elliptical has a few advantages over running outside or on a treadmil.

The elliptical provides an impact-free workout. This means your joints (your knees especially) will not suffer repeated jolts as your feet land on the surface. This is a big plus over a treadmill and running in general. In fact, with a cross trainer, the soles of your shoes never leave the footpads.

Being an impact-free exercise, your body can work more time and you can focus your workout on the cardiovascular activity rather than your muscle strength.

Your cardiovascular ability improves far more quickly than your lower legs muscles. With running, this means that you have to start with shorter distances until your lower leg muscles are strong enough to take the burden of repeated imapct. This is very frustrating when you start exercising, as your heart and lungs are able to carry on but you have to stop so as not to hurt your muscles and bones.

In fact, if you are tempted to add distance too early while running (on a treadmill or outside) – you may start getting lower leg injuries which will force you to stop running at all for a while.

With an elliptical cross trainer, you can work out for as long as you like. Your lower leg muscles and bones are not subject to the repeated beating they get when you run. In fact, with an elliptical cross trainer you can go to the limits of your cardiovascular ability, improving it rapidly as you carry on exercising.

2. You Can Work Both Your Upper and Lower Body at the Same Time

With a treadmill, you basically run. Running is a great sport but it doesn’t provide an all-of-body workout. Your legs may move fast enough, but your abdomen and arms are not really doing much. If you want an exercise machine that works both your lower and upper body – you should really go with an elliptical cross trainer or a rowing machine.

You don’t absolutely have to work your upper body with the cross trainer. Many women prefer to only grab the handlebars but not actively move them. This is possible with the ellipticals, and you can perform a whole workout with only your lower body working.

Having said that, pulling and pushing on the cross trainer’s handlebars will do wonders to tone your arms and chest. If you are a woman and are worried that working out on your arms will give you the muscular look – you can stop worrying now. It takes much more than a daily exercise on a cross trainer to give you those man-arms. You can safely work your upper body on the cross trainer and enjoy the toned, taut look your skin is going to get.

3. It is Risk and Injury Free

Treadmills usually have large red stop buttons somewhere on them. These buttons are there for a reason – many people fall from treadmills every year. All it takes is for you to miss a step or lose your balance for a fraction of a second.

With a cross trainer, on the other hand, your feet never leave the footpads. You couldn’t miss a step on it even if you wanted to. Additionally, the cross trainer stops when you stop. It doesn’t have a belt that keeps moving even if you decided you want to stand still for a few seconds. This is why you’ll never see the stop buttons on the elliptical cross trainers. There’s just no need for them.

As discussed earlier, the elliptical provides an impact-free workout. All the lower leg injuries you may get as a result of running are just not there. Forget about shin splints, ITB, stress fractures, plantar fasciitis and the rest of those. All you get from a cross trainer is good, healthy fatigue.

Is There a Downside?

Well, sadly, yes. The main downside of a cross trainer is that it is very easy to delude yourself with it. The way cross trainers work is they have a large magnetic resistance wheel which spins as you move your legs forward and backwards. If you set the resistance level to a level that is too low – this wheel uses your body weight to pick up a spinning momentum. In effect, you’ll be working out for a minute or two, and after that – the cross trainer does all the work and you’re hardly burning any fat.

To make sure you don’t fall into this trap, you need to feel resistance throughout the entire workout. If at some point you feel that your feet are moving “in air” – raise the resistance level immediately. If you don’t want to raise the resistance level, or you reached the highest level the machine provides – you need to slow down, to let the wheel lose its momentum.

A good sign that you’re really working out and not just relying on momentum is that your thighs (and quads) are working. If they do not feel like they do any work – you are running on momentum alone.

All this information and some more is available in the detailed comparison between a cross trainer and a treadmill on the Choozza website. You can set the importance of each aspect and see which of the machines is better for your needs. Choozza also has a comparison between the cross trainer to a rowing machine that you can use in the same way.