Holding onto the Treadmill for Dear Life!

In the gyms that I frequent I often see the following phenomenon… Somebody starts working on the treadmill and begins to jack up the incline but they put the incline so high that they can’t actually work at that level so they have to cling onto the bar just to stay on the treadmill.

Last week I saw a really extreme example of this behaviour. A man who often seems to do things very strangely in the gym set the incline level at what I can only assume to be the maximum. In order just to keep himself from flying off the thing, not only did he have to hold on tightly but he also leaned back so that the angle between his body and the base of the treadmill was the same as if he was standing normally with the incline flat.

I couldn’t find any pictures of anybody doing this so let me try to illustrate with some silly diagrams!

Diagram 1 - Running on flat treadmill

Ok diagram 1 here is pretty standard – the treadmill is flat and somebody is running (or walking) without holding onto the bar. Look at the dotted red line. This serves the highlight the angle between the runner and the running surface. Here it is clearly a right angle: 90 degrees.

[Edit] Oh bugger, there's no dotted red line in that picture! Well I could recreate the picture but it would be easier to ask you to scroll down at look at diagram 3 which has the red line in the same place! Oooopsie! :-)

Diagram 2 - Running on a high incline

Now in diagram two the runner has increased the incline of the treadmill but he is still running and not holding on. Because of gravity, humans need to be positioned at a right angle to the core of the earth. The treadmill provides an artificial ground for the runner and in order to stay on the treadmill and not fall off, the runner has to effectively learn forward to keep the centre of gravity positioned correctly through his body.

What the incline of the treadmill does here is increase the angle between the runner and the artificial surface beneath him. Notice how that angle is larger (or smaller depending on which of the two angles you are looking at! I’m looking at the one to the left of the red line.) That’s what gives him the extra resistance and thus makes the run harder. Basic principles at work here.

Diagram 3- Holding on to a treadmill on a high incline

So far so good but look what happens when the runner decides that he can’t actually run at the incline he has set so instead decides to hold on. What usually happens is that as he holds onto the bar he effectively hangs his bodyweight off it which changes the angle of his body – he is now positioned once again at a right angle to his artificial ground. This means that the resistance that he tried to increase by increasing the incline is effectively cancelled out by his need to hold on.

Now this diagram is an extreme example but this was exactly what I saw in my gym last week. The angle was so high that I couldn’t see how anyone could get up a hill like that without holding onto something. This man was literally holding on for dear life and as I watched him I could see the angle of his body positioned just like the one in my diagram above.

So What? What Does it Matter Anyway?

This guy is kidding himself. He thinks he is pushing himself to the max by setting the incline so high and yet he is defeating his own efforts by having to hold on. Of course I also see many people holding onto the bar even when the treadmill is flat. This carries health problems of its own and a quick Google search will reveal lots of informative pages about that. However what I would really like to get across is not so much the health problems of holding on exactly, but the fact that this man is sabotaging his own efforts and tricking himself into thinking that he is working much harder than he is.

This is a recurring theme in the fat loss and fitness arena. I have been guilty of kidding myself in so many ways over the years and it is only now that I am starting to see where many of us are going wrong. I think it’s important to highlight the ways in which we do this to ourselves because there is nothing worse than coming to the end of the week where you think you have eaten well and exercised well and you do your weighing and measuring and do not get the results you expect. You wonder why your plan doesn’t seem to be working when you are obviously doing everything right.

I’m going to start a new category for this post and I’ll be putting in quite a few more articles in it in the coming weeks.