How do you count Treadmill miles? Elliptical miles?

You can count a treadmill mile as the same as a road mile in your log without losing sleep, but usually people tend to count somewhere from 8-10 minutes on the elliptical as a mile in their logs. Personally, I don't think elliptical miles should be counted in your mileage.

Thanks for your thoughts - I should have said i'm planning on moving *some* of my miles.

Any reason why elliptical is considered less than treadmill (I'm a noob at both treadmill and elliptical really, only used a "Nordic Ski" system once off an injury in my college days - which probably shows my age!)

I just want to take some stress off the knees.

I recommend going by time, not mileage, e.g. 40 mile week + 2 hours cross training or something like that.

You simply multiply the treadmill/elliptical miles by zero. You don't actually move at all when you do those things.

I go by heart rate. I know what paces I run at various heart rates. So whatever HR I do elliptical at, I equate that to the running pace that I run at the same HR. Then, just set up your spreadsheet log to divide the elliptical minutes by the pace to get miles. 60 minutes at a 7:00 minute equivalent HR pace is about 8 1/2 miles.

As for treadmill, if you set the incline at 1.5%, I believe that is equivalent to flat road running.

metoo2 wrote:

As for treadmill, if you set the incline at 1.5%, I believe that is equivalent to flat road running.

No, it is not. It is equivalent to running up a 1.5% hill with the wind at your back blowing the same speed as you are running.

I trained a lot on the elliptical a few years ago. Actually for about 3 months, I only did the elliptical during the week and then raced a 5k every weekend. I never counted any elliptical workouts as mileage. When I run on the treadmill, I count whatever the readout says. Even if I do an hour at 6% incline, I don't convert to what that would be on level ground.

Simply the worst theory in the history of the world, do you literally move when learning in school? No, but you can very easily progress forward.

my own rules........ wrote:

metoo2 wrote:

As for treadmill, if you set the incline at 1.5%, I believe that is equivalent to flat road running.

No, it is not. It is equivalent to running up a 1.5% hill with the wind at your back blowing the same speed as you are running.

I trained a lot on the elliptical a few years ago. Actually for about 3 months, I only did the elliptical during the week and then raced a 5k every weekend. I never counted any elliptical workouts as mileage. When I run on the treadmill, I count whatever the readout says. Even if I do an hour at 6% incline, I don't convert to what that would be on level ground.

if you are running really fast, the the incline comes into play. The study from Doust (I think) was comparing over ground running at about 7 min/mile with the 1% incline.

luv2run wrote:

my own rules........ wrote:

Daniels came to the same, scientific, conclusion. 1.5% approximates similar physiological reactions to the road.

No, it is not. It is equivalent to running up a 1.5% hill with the wind at your back blowing the same speed as you are running.

I trained a lot on the elliptical a few years ago. Actually for about 3 months, I only did the elliptical during the week and then raced a 5k every weekend. I never counted any elliptical workouts as mileage. When I run on the treadmill, I count whatever the readout says. Even if I do an hour at 6% incline, I don't convert to what that would be on level ground.

if you are running really fast, the the incline comes into play. The study from Doust (I think) was comparing over ground running at about 7 min/mile with the 1% incline.

I count non running cardio (elliptical, swimming, cycling etc) in hours. So a typical week might be 40 miles plus 4 hours.

I'd like to bring back this thread. I'm sidelined and need to start cross training on the elliptical. Anyone disagree with what's already been posted?

Just go by time. You're injured, not supplementing cross training for real running. If you ran about 7 hours/week when healthy then consider doing a similar amount of cross training.

Why would you want to make up some silly fake conversion of elliptical to running miles? Do you also come up with conversions for number of minutes of tv watched to running miles or number of dogs you pet per week to running miles?

I use my elliptical a couple of times a week and just take whatever number its readout shows. This generally means ~10 minute miles, which is way slower than I would be logging were I running under a similar level of exertion. But that's just it; it's NOT running.

So why count it at all? Because it helps me record and track aggregate volume numbers over time.

What could you possibly be doing with aggregate elliptical numbers over time? Why do you need them?

Why are you counting mileage at all?Just run for a certain amount of time whether on a treadmill or road/trail.This obsession with "milage" (sic) is ridiculous. It is meaningless.

KneeSaver wrote:

In an effort to take some pounding off the knees, I'm thinking of moving to Treadmill / Elliptical.

How do you guys count this in your weekly milage?

but why though wrote:

What could you possibly be doing with aggregate elliptical numbers over time? Why do you need them?

Nothing useful :-)

One of the metrics I keep is the number of running miles/elliptical miles/other cross training miles, all of which together is supposed to indicate in some vague sense how much cardio I did that week. Then I can look back at my training log over the course of a year or two and draw a little line chart or whatever and see that I really slacked in December or kicked ass in June or whatever.

It's not "accurate" in any sense of the word but it gives me a decent idea of what happened.

I had a bad calf injury that took about 4 months to fully resolve. Over that period, I worked out daily on a Horizon elliptical I bought off Amazon. Instead of trying to convert my E-miles to actual running miles, I just used Daniels Intensity points calculations based on heart rate & time as opposed to time & distance, time & ave pace, or distance and ave. pace.

The latest version of this table (exel) can be downloaded here:

http://electricblues.com/html/runpro.html

Um none? wrote:

Why are you counting mileage at all?

Just run for a certain amount of time whether on a treadmill or road/trail.

This obsession with "milage" (sic) is ridiculous. It is meaningless.

KneeSaver wrote:

In an effort to take some pounding off the knees, I'm thinking of moving to Treadmill / Elliptical.

How do you guys count this in your weekly milage?

It's completely arbitrary. Most of the guys on me team train kilometers instead of miles. They are training like 1.5 times as much as I am.