Treadmill vs. Outdoors Walking

With the switch to Daylight Savings Time, you may be tempted to start walking outdoors again instead of on the treadmill. Is walking outdoors better than walking on the treadmill? They are a bit different. The motorized tread and lack of uneven surfaces, curbs, etc. slightly reduce your calories per mile on a treadmill. You can make that small difference up by adding as little as a 1% incline on the treadmill. However, outdoors walking offers far more variety of the surfaces and inclines that it is superior when you are training for an upcoming longer walking event. For one thing, most treadmills lack a downhill incline feature, so you never train your downhill muscles. And doing all of the step-ups to curbs and dodging other pedestrians and obstacles has a training effect. A treadmill is great for burning calories, but for real-world walking training, I still think nothing beats the real world outdoors.

• Treadmill or Outdoors Walking - Which is Better?
• Manual vs. Motorized Treadmills
• Best Budget Treadmills

^{Crocus Photo © Wendy Bumgardner 2005}