Welcome to the Get Fit Guys quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm the Get Fit Guy and in today's episode you're going to learn about the best way to use an elliptical trainer.

Now I have some friends died inwool exercise enthusiasts and they think the

elliptical trainer at the gym or those funny-looking outdoor stand-up elliptical trainers with wheels

don't really work at all, especially when it comes to making you, say, a better runner. Well,

many personal trainers also tend to stop at the elliptical trainer.

And they instead choose modalities like the treadmill, the rowing machine, or the bicycle for interval training, or aerobic cardio,

because they consider the elliptical trainer to be some easy, fashionable exercise, contraption, and not something that's functional.

But a recent study on elliptical trainer, specifically the outdoor type that are on wheels, call my eye, the study was entitled a physiological and

subjective comparison of the elliptigo and running in highly fit trained runners. And they looked

at elliptical training on something called this elliptigo as a potential

form of cross training that could provide a low impact running specific high intensity exercise

experience without the actual joint jarring that running would typically cause. So they looked at the

physiological response to running with the physiological response to an equivalent

workout on an outdoor elliptical trainer.

And what they showed was complete maintenance of the fitness necessary to maintain running

performance in highly trained fit runners who are using an elliptical trainer.

Now, in addition, this fitness was achieved with a

lower rating of perceived exertion and a higher rating of enjoyment. So it turns out that elliptical

trainers aren't just silly exercise devices. They actually can be used to train both the general

population and highly trained runners for enhancing fitness. And there's

actually even more good news when it comes to elliptical trainers, not just the outdoor ones,

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