Both treadmills and elliptical trainers are popular machines which can help you with your fitness goals. You can find them in almost every gym and a lot of these machines are also available for home usage. They are convenient to use and give you a good workout without stepping outdoors.
Treadmill vs Elliptical trainer
But which of these fitness equipment can give you a better workout? Especially when you are looking for a good muscle tone. We will help you find out exactly that.
Both treadmills and elliptical trainers give you a cardiovascular workout with a little bit of a difference. Treadmill helps you to run or jog which in turn engages all your leg muscles. Running is a great exercise for your overall health. Elliptical trainers also use your leg muscles at its primary functions, you do have handles for your grips and upper body movement but that cannot be considered as complete exercise.
So both machines help in your lower body movement but the main difference is in the form of movement they offer. Elliptical machines give you a non-impact exercise where as you do get some impact on your joints when you are running on a treadmill.
You can change the intensity of your workout on both these machines. With treadmills, you can use incline and resistance features whereas in cross trainers, you can change the resistance levels.
While treadmill gives you a better overall workout, elliptical trainer is better at isolating your hamstring and calf muscles. So if you keep working at these exercises your leg muscles will definitely get stronger with time. However, if you are looking for that perfect tone and definition of your muscles, there are other factors that come into play as well.
Your body composition and size of your muscles is what makes you look ripped. If you have layers of fat on your legs and body any muscles underneath will not show up no matter how hard you try.
For the best results with muscle tone, you can choose any of these machines as they are equally good and offer similar workouts. As you burn more calories in your workouts, you will gain more strength and endurance. You must add other muscle specific exercises (weight training) to improve strength and the form of your muscles. Those exercises should include both upper body and lower body exercises to keep balance and symmetry.
As you lose fat and gain lean muscle, you will get well defined and toned shape. Remember, muscles have a definite shape whereas fat does nt. You want to have nice lean and shapely legs, you have to start up with exercises.
So in all, both these machines can definitely help with muscle tone but none of them can be solely used to achieve it. You will have to add more exercises to your exercise routine.
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