Changing Your Treadmill Workout

Most of the time I don’t use a treadmill. I prefer to run outdoors because I like getting out on the road where my running stride feels more natural.

The treadmill however can be very beneficial for certain types of workouts.

On a treadmill you have some great tools right at your fingertips. You can control your running or walking speed, time, and incline, but how often do we just set these adjustments to one setting and forget about them for duration of our workout? I encourage you not to take this approach and instead use these tools to make your workout interesting and effective.

The possibilities are endless but here are three good suggestions.

Ladder Up

With this workout you build in speed and intensity over a short period till you are close to your max peceived exertion. Then you back-off on the treadmill speed, recover for a couple of minutes, and then buildup or “ladder up” again.

For example:
Start at a treadmill speed of 5.0 and get a good warm up for 10 minutes.
After the warm up take it up to 6.0 for 1 minute,
Then 6.5 for 1 minute,
Now 7.0 for one minute (now your moving)
Finally 7.5 for 1 one minute (Whew!)
Then back off so you are back down to 6.0. Jog there for 2-3 minutes to recover and then do it again.

You speed will need to be faster or slower than what I have suggested based on your current level of conditioning. Don’t be afraid to experiment.
See if you can repeat the “ladder up” up to 4 times. That should give you a good 20 minute workout on the treadmill and this kind of training is great for fat loss.

Here’s another idea you could do a similar “ladder up” but instead of changing the speed of the the treadmill increase the incline and keep the speed constant.

Intervals or Fartleks

Fartlek style training is great because how often do we really run at an absolutely constant speed. If you are running outside you may be going uphill or downhill. If you are in a race your pace will always be speeding up or slowing down depending on what is happening around you. We need to train our bodies to adapt to these variables and that is the reason for doing fartleks. Not to mention it makes your workout harder and is great for fat loss.

Your fartlek interval is made up of one period of running fast followed by a period of running slower to recover.

For example:
Warm up for 10 minutes at a comfortable jogging speed of 5.0.
Then speed up for 1-2 minutes to 7.0 – 7.5 This is your fast interval.
Then slow back down to 6.0 and recover for 1-2 minutes or more if needed.
Repeat fast and then slow up to 10 times for a great workout.

Again your speeds will be different than those suggested based on your conditioning and you can have your intervals be longer or shorter to suit your needs. What if you just did 30 second intervals? How would that feel? Or are you able to hold out for a longer 3 minute interval? It will surprise you how quickly the workout seems to go by when running fartleks vs. running at a constant speed.

Want more variety? Try creating an in interval switching from a high incline to a low incline.

Ladder Down

This one is a little harder to master. I would suggest starting with the first two examples till you have a good idea of your ideal running speed and capabilities.

The concept here is that you get a harder workout because you go hard in the beginning when your body is recovered and as you get tired you decrease the speed just a little bit to compensate. However, over the duration of the entire workout you are working at a higher intensity than your average.

For example:
Start at a treadmill speed of 5.0 and get a good warm up for 10 minutes.
After the warm up take it up to 7.5 for 1 minute,
Then 7.2 for 1 minute,
Now 6.8 for one minute
Finally 6.5 for 1 one minute
Then back off so you are back down to 6.0. Jog there for 2-3 minutes to recover and then do it again.

I hope these suggestions help add some variety to your workout and remember that changing up your workout is a good thing. It places new stresses on the body which in turn cause you to adapt and get stronger.

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