Elliptical trainers are well known as calorie burners. These alone can accelerate the development of your muscles if planned properly. It causes no impact on your body healthy so you don’t have to be worried about any harm it might cause.
Working out on best elliptical trainers for a good amount of time was good for improving the overall body temperature. If cardio workouts are your favorite style, then choosing an elliptical to do the workout will be a good option. All the benefits you can embrace with almost nothing to hurt you back.
That’s how you can describe elliptical workouts. To add some variety into the workouts and for increasing the effectiveness, it will be good for you to couple these with other exercises. The usual workouts you can couple with elliptical training are walking lunges, pushups with arm rotations body weight squats.
This will be a boon for the people who find working out with fitness machines mundane and dry. And you will be covering more parts of your body with multiple exercises boosting your fitness level. Understanding the science of body development will help you do the workouts more efficiently.
Proper education about fitness is actually necessary otherwise you will jump into random workouts dreaming a well-built body but gaining nothing. People have different wrong notions regarding workouts. Some people think working out with a lot of weight right from the start will make you fit in a short time.
Some others simply think of the actions as important without giving importance to the postures. And the outcome is poor performance as your muscles are not getting worked out the way they are supposed to get worked out. In every workout, the actual thing happening to your body is frequent contraction and relaxation of muscles.
With more exercises, the muscle fibers will be pushed further resulting in overall muscle development. During contractions, the muscles must be subjected to greater weight and strength for development. While you are stretching the muscles.
They tend to remain in the expanded state which prevents it from faster contractions. This is the reason why fitness experts always ask people to stretch after workouts and not before the workouts. If you try to lift weights after stretching out the muscles.
You will find it too difficult as the muscles have got a lot weaker and flexible after the stretches. So, make sure not to stretch before workouts. We have seen many people at the gyms mistaking stretching for warm-ups and engage in stretches before workouts.
Avoid doing this. What you need is a good warm-up session for around 10 minutes before workouts. This will make your body ready for the intense training that it is going to be subjected to. Again take the example of a machine. If the machine is really complex.
Then surely before taking it to the full potential, you will give a test run to make sure that all parts are working fine. This preliminary run will make the machine warmed and ready for huge tasks. The same way your body must also get a warm-up for the better overall result.
It is not advisable to just hop on a machine after slacking for a while. Your whole body has no clue that you are going to do something intense so chances of getting injured are pretty high without a proper warm-up session. Flex your joints, move your muscles and maybe take a light jog too.
These things are enough to keep your body ready for workouts. When you start doing warm-ups before every workout, you will start to notice the difference it makes on your body. Don’t think of it lightly as a preliminary step you must do before workouts and slack over it.
Imagine what a lumberjack will do if he needs to cut down a huge tree. He will sharpen his tools first. The sharper the tools are the better each of his cuts on the tree will be. Same way good warm-ups can upgrade your body. If you find it too hard to believe, try it for yourself.
Try to do the same exercise after having a warm-up session and then at another do it without the warm-up session. You will certainly notice the upper hand you gained with the warm-ups. Warm-ups can increase overall body temperature and endurance capacity.
This literally means that you will be able to lift heavier weights and run faster than usual. Moreover, the flexibility of the body will increase making you breach more angles that were harder to reach during workouts. Apart from all this, after a small workout, you will make you mentally ready to tackle any kind of intensity.
This motivation will have its effect during the workouts. Elliptical machines are primarily meant for working out your lower body. These machines act as the best elliptical for home use. There are two kinds of pedaling motions you can engage in. Either the forward one or the reverse rides.
In both cases, it is the muscles in your legs that get worked out the most. The calf muscles will get stronger with time with ellipticals. We have compiled a list of stretches that you could couple with elliptical training. Try to do the ones that you find most comfortable.
1. Wall Stretches
Wall stretches are simple ways through which you can stretch out your calf muscles. You can do wall stretches without needing any particular equipment almost in all the places. All you will need is a wall to perform these stretches. Go near a wall and stand an arm’s distance away from it.
Put your body in a lunge pose with the left foot placed behind the right one. Now keeping the left leg straight slowly push the heel down to the floor while bending the right knee. Only stand up when you feel like the calf has been stretched.
The longer you can hold the stretch the better the muscles will develop. As a standard try to hold on to this stretch position for at least 30 seconds. Repeat doing the same wall stretch with the other foot.
2. Step Stretch
Step stretch puts the focus on calf muscles and shin muscles. Step stretches can be done using steps. All you have to do is place your foot on a step. Make sure that only the rear part of your foot i.e. the ball is in contact with the floor.
Now in this position bend your left knee slowly and keep pushing the right heel to the ground. Keep this position for at least 30 seconds. Once you feel that the muscles are stretched enough move on to the next leg and do the stretch with the other foot.
3. Butt Kicks
Butt kicks can be done for two different purposes. One is for warming up the muscles in the leg and the other is for increasing the overall body temperature. It is quite simple to do. To begin with, bend your knees and using one of your legs slowly kick the back of your butt using the heels.
This is a stretch that is more qualified to be done with the best elliptical bikes. Doing butt kicks can bring about many other health benefits too including giving a good posture for your body and improving the running stride.
Elliptical training is considered to be a good method for training runners. So, if you want to know how specifically it will benefit the runners then check our section on that.
4. Trunk Rotations
Trunk rotations can be used for improving your overall body capability and it helps in stretching a variety of body parts. Your legs, arms, and the core body muscles will see significant improvement after trunk rotations.
It also increases the overall body temperature and blood flow making you more capable of working out intensely. Just lie on the floor with your knees bent in such a way that your feet are laying flat to the floor.
Keep your arms at the sides of your body. Now keeping your neck straight and the shoulders close to your body rotate the trunk of your body to the left.
Make sure that the right-hand blade and forearm is laying flat on the floor during the stretch. Now hold this stretch position for around 3 to 5 minutes.
Now, slowly come back to your initial position. That will be one stretch in that direction. Do the same stretch to the right side too and you will be done with the trunk rotations.
5. Pike Stretch
Pike stretches are focused on the hamstring muscles and calf muscles. Stand straight with a shoulder distance between both the foot. Now bend your body and reach down to touch your toes with your hands.
Now slowly walk your hands at this position step by step. Make sure that the foot is at a shoulder distance while walking. The knees must not bend during the motion.
Structure wise you will be looking similar to a “V” shape. If you have been practicing yoga, then this stretch will be a lot similar to you.
Actually, this is a lot similar to the yoga stretch which is called the “downward dog”. Keep this stretch position for around 30 seconds and then relax.
Foods to Avoid Before Exercise and Warming Up Sessions
There are some foods that you need to stay away from during the workout periods as they can affect your workouts negatively. Usually, we advise people to take a lot of fiber for better digestion. But when it comes to workouts, the normal rules don’t apply because what you do is entirely different.
Foods with a lot of fiber content are too hard to digest. During intense workouts, you will need to spend a lot of energy and the food in your stomach will not be able to provide the energy when you need it.
So, avoid foods rich in fiber content. Also, avoid foods like candy bars, meats, fries and potato chips which are also unhealthy to eat during workout sessions.
Stretches are done to maximize the result of the workouts so don’t think of it as methods for exercising your muscles and randomly engage yourself in many stretches together.
You only need to select specific sets of stretches that you are comfortable with. Warm up sessions are also to be done in the same manner. The warm-up session before elliptical training can be done on the elliptical trainer itself.
That will be the easiest way to warm up. You will also save a lot of time in that way. By the end of the warm-up session, you should be sweating. Elliptical trainers are simple fitness machines to workout with.
Depending upon the budget you can afford, you can even choose the best cheap ellipticals. These are going to serve the same purpose as theelliptical available for under $2500 or over $2500.
Conclusion
This article is aimed at making your workout life more efficient. Fitness machines are great on their own but when you can combine them with different workouts the productivity you get out of them to willincrease many folds. Elliptical trainers are famed as great fitness machines that cause no harm to your body joints.
If you couple few workouts with them the whole experience gets much better. Not many people know what to combine with what. This is the reason why our experts have put their time into making a brief article which will give you many suggestions which you can use in your workouts.
Always include a warm-up session and stretching session with elliptical training. Doing the workouts in a proper structure can amplify the benefits. And a bit of advice is also there for people who want to keep their body healthy. Concentrate on bettering your diet pattern.
Eating healthy will reduce the intake of things that can potentially harm your body and it will also help in supporting you in your intense workout schedule. In a nutshell, it is not always about the equipment you use.
It is the combined contribution of many different things that you daily that help you keep a fit body. So, learn the basics well and become a healthy person.
