Star Trac Elite CrossTrainer

My favorite machines at the gym are the new Star Trac elliptical machines. I was skeptical at first because I liked the old ones just fine, but I'm finding I like the new ones better. The only thing I like better about the old Lifefitness ones are the sensors that measure your heart rate are right on the poles where your hands are all of the time anyway. The new Star Trac machines just have them on the handles you grab onto if you let go of the poles. The drawback is you can only know your heart rate whenever you grab the handles with the sensors. It's not a big deal I guess and I'm getting used to just checking my heart rate off and on, but I still like to see it the whole time I'm working out. One of the better things about the Star Trac machines is the fan they have. It's just a small fan that sticks off the very top of the display and even though it doesn't exactly blow you away I think it's still a great thing to have.

Until I read it at the Star Trac website tonight I didn't know what SPM meant on the display. It's fairly obvious once you're on this machine it has something to do with how fast you're going but I was never been able to figure what it stood for. The Lifefitness ones have RPM on their display, but these Star Trac ones have SPM in its' place. Whatever SPM was I knew I was doing about 130 to 140 of them at the top end. It turns out it means strides per minute. That makes sense because I'm doing about double the number of them as I was RPM on the other machine.

My least favorite machines at the gym are the Cybex Total Body Arc Trainers. They look like this... I only was on one of these evil machines once but I'm nearly certain I will not be giving one a second chance. I spent maybe 20 minutes on it and everything seemed OK until I got off of it. I wondered as I was on it if I should be because I thought the motion might be hard on my knees. When I got off I found out I was right. The pain didn't last long but why would I put myself though it at all when there are fitness machines there that aren't so hard on my knees?

For the time being and until it gets warm enough outside to that point where I can ride my bike again, the Star Trac Elite CrossTrainer is my machine of choice. I'm going to continue to use one several times a week for a half hour to 45 minutes at a time while I listen to headphones and watch TVs with the closed captioning turned on. The headphones are to partly to drown out the crap music they play on the speakers in the fitness room.....but maybe that's another post for another day.