Hard elliptical every day?

Anytime you can get your heart rate up when cross-training, it's positive. You're still able to work at high heart rates. When you return to running, your return to regular training speeds and loads will be a little bit faster. I would think that 190-200 HR for 40 minutes would be really hard to do every single day for an extended period time.

If you are working out consistently, it will also help you keep your weight down. At higher resistance, it may also help strengthen muscles around your knee. Most importantly, it will keep you from going crazy when you aren't training. You may also want to cycle a little as well.

Getting some 60-90 minute efforts in the pool or gym would be great for your return to running.

The without taxing part is physiologically implausible, especially if you were already in shape, are you sure this is accurate? Were you not taxing your muscles at that HR while running? Have you talked to a doctor about this?

Thanks for the replies. Elliptical is way "easier" than running for me. I maintain a very high cadence (220-250 for reps) with medium resistance + no incline, which gets the heart rate way up but does not strain my legs. When I'm in shape, my HR seems to be around 5-10 bpm lower for the same effort on the elliptical.

Can you define what you are doing exactly? Is no incline 0 (out of 20?). Is medium resistance 10 out of 20? The reason I ask is because 220-250 is a very high cadence on the elliptical. When I'm injured, I try to use an incline around 10 and up resistance to the point where I'm around 200 strides a minute. This feels closer to running than 230+strides a minute. I guess at the end of the day its just about getting the heart rate up, but this seems like a weird way to use the elliptical.

What is the condition of your gym like? Your hr could be higher simply due to limited airflow compared to outdoors.

That's about right -- 0 incline, resistance around 9 for longer reps and a bit higher for shorter/harder reps. The high cadence feels good to me and has worked in the past. The gym has good airflow.

If your knee can tolerate a spin bike as well, that can be a useful tool in terms of cadence (RPMs on the bike) and wattage. If you jack the resistance up high enough for intervals of time it’ll shoot your HR up and you’ll gain strength and power and handle be a able higher workload than you would on land that will translate fairly well when you can run again. I was out for four months with a nasty injury and I would do intervals on the bike with 40-50min worth of work twice a week and 60 min plus on “long run “ days and finish up with 20min elliptical cooldown to get the biomechanics aspect of running. I came back to full speed running within two months with one minor hiccup. You don’t need to do hard sessions everyday to keep fitness, I’d say you can get away with three times a week doing hard sessions with a bit more volume than you would running and keep the other days easy like popping on some music or podcasts while on the elliptical, pool or bike. The key with injuries is cross training enough but not too much because you don’t want to come back to running feeling a bit burned out.

You could also mix it up with incorporating aqua jogging into the routine. Rotate between the 3: aqua jog, bike, elliptical so it’s different forces on different muscles and stimulates running in different ways