Why Paul Plakas Hates the Elliptical Trainer

During several X-Weighted episodes, Paul Plakas has stated that he hates elliptical trainers. "I question the need for them," he says. "People get on them because they are a low-impact form of exercise and are therefore attractive to people with back pain or knee pain etc. But, if you have joint pain, you need to look at the reason for that pain and try to correct it, rather than just avoid the pain altogether by doing no-impact exercises. Otherwise you'll never improve the stability of those joints."

If you do have joint pain, Plakas recommends going to see an orthopedic specialist or a physiotherapist, who can carry out a Kinetic Chain Assessment, which identifies muscular imbalances and postural distortion in the body. Once this test is done, the specialist can recommend appropriate exercises that you can do to help alleviate the problem rather than just avoid it.

Plakas says that another reason people get on the elliptical trainer is that it shows how many calories they have burned, and they like to be able to say that they burned 500 calories at the end of their workout. Problem is, the calorie counters are often way off because of the way they are programmed.

"If I input into the machine that I'm a male, 6 ft 1, 200 pounds, and do level 5 for an hour it will show how many calories I burn. If another man with the same measurement as me gets on and works out at the same level, the machine will show that he burns the same calories. But what happens if that person is really unfit, as opposed to me who is really fit?” says Plakas. “That workload was nothing for me, whereas it nearly killed him. So, he’d be burning a lot more calories than I would be - yet the machine shows the same number.”

People using elliptical trainers may think that they are getting a great workout because they get sweaty, but this isn’t necessarily true. “The machines are in a gym where air may not be circulating properly. The machines give off heat, you are beside other machines and people that are also giving off heat. If you were using that elliptical trainer outside you might not even break out in a sweat,” explains Plakas.

As for your increased heart rate, Plakas says that while it's true that you're circulating blood through your body, you need to find an activity that increases cardiovascular activity in a way that is specific to the things you want to get better at in your life. “The movement of the elliptical trainer is not done in any part of your day whatsoever, so it won’t make you better at anything,” says Plakas.

This was a bone of contention between Plakas and Angela and Nicole, from season 1. “They were doing the elliptical trainer and lost some weight on it, but when it actually came to climbing a set of stairs, it destroyed them. All that training they had done on the elliptical machine did nothing for them,” he says. “It does the same repetitive motion again and again which is absolutely useless.”

For all of those reasons, Plakas hates the elliptical trainer. “For the time you spend exercising, there are 1000 better choices than the elliptical trainer,” he says.

This post is a repeat, but look forward to more original content to come in the future.