Productopia | Treadmills

Buying a treadmill could be on your list of end of year purchases but Black Friday isn't necessarily the day to do it. After looking at the circulars from Dick's Sporting Goods, Kmart, Modell's, Sears and Sports Authority, our advice is to skip the Black Friday sprint and run your favorite route instead.

2011 is nearly upon us and with it comes the scrutiny. Are we eating well? Are we exercising enough? In most cases, the answers are no and no. The easiest thing that you can do, according to fitness experts, is just put one foot in front of the other and walk. Start with 10 minutes a day and work up from there. But when temperatures are in the tweens, teens and twenties, the last place you want to be is outside. So a home treadmill looks pretty good. Choose right and you could have a valuable workout partner; choose poorly and you’ll have an expensive clothes rack. Use this list of considerations, in addition to our treadmill reports, to determine what model is best for you.

 If a treadmill has been on your to-buy list, the Sears Black Friday circular released by bfads.net may entice you with headlines like “Save $1,100.”  The truth, however, is that you can pretty much get those deals right now... or can you? A careful reading of the Black Friday circular reveals some important details.

It may not come as a huge surprise that treadmills, elliptical trainers and other fitness machines overestimate the number of calories burned. But you might raise your eyebrows at the margin of error -- especially if you're relying on a machine's calorie counter for your weight-loss strategy. According to a recent segment on Good Morning America, treadmills and stair steppers overestimate by about 12% each. That might not make a huge difference if you're only walking for a mile or so. But it starts to add up. If you're walking for an hour and the machine says you've burned 450 calories, you've really burned 400. But even that isn't too bad compared to elliptical trainers, which in the GMA study proved off by a whopping 42%.