Walking on an Incline

Now that it's winter, it's tough to walk or run outside on a regular schedule because bad weather is always popping up. Having a treadmill or a gym membership becomes really beneficial during the cold winter months. When I can't get outside to run, sometimes I run on the treadmill, but oftentimes, I walk on the treadmill for an extended period of time and watch one of my favorite TV programs. I find it hard to run on a treadmill and watch TV because of all the bouncing up and down, so to still burn a lot of calories, I vary the incline and walking speed to give my workout an extra push.

Increasing incline and decline have the obvious benefits of burning more calories and working muscles harder, but there are other benefits. It's been shown that varying your walking/running speed and incline/decline increases the effectiveness of your workout. By maintaining the same speed on the same incline/decline over several workouts, your body becomes used to the workout and is less stimulated, burning fewer calories. By mixing things up, your body is stimulated more during workouts instead of finding ways to cover the distance using less energy.

Check out this article from Family Circle Magazine which outlines a beginner and intermediate 30 minute variable speed and incline treadmill workout.

http://familycircle.com/fc/story.jhtml?storyid=/templatedata/fc/story/data/1161182457015.xml