Greg's Running Blog

I haven’t been on the elliptical trainer for almost two weeks. I have started my running and I never looked back. I also reduced the amount of cardio from the 90 minutes per day to just the running. Running seemed to have kept my heart rate much higher than I could ever get it up on the elliptical trainer and I burned a lot more calories. But lately I have started losing muscle mass I think so I need to take the pace of loss back down a notch otherwise I’ll be way too skinny or just so called skinny fat with no muscle only fat.

However, my running regime now calls for a day of cross training on Fridays for 60 minutes right after my Thursday rest day. So I had to get back on the elliptical and do my cross training. I have always been wearing a heart rate monitor for all my training sessions but I never really bothered to pay attention where my heart rate was during the exercise. I basically noted that the higher my heart rate was the more calories I burned the better it was for me. I have also noted that I’ve had problems with getting my heart rate up on the elliptical sometimes.

Today I purposefully watched my heart rate and made sure it stayed within the so called endurance zone which is about 65-75% of your maximum heart rate. I actually ended up right at 68% for the average which is just right. Being on the elliptical felt so easy at first but by the time I was done with 60 minutes of it was ready to get off. It got pretty tiring after about 30 minutes but I rode out the entire 30 minutes.