Incline Treadmill Calculator

This is an Incline Treadmill Calculator I have been using for a couple of years now for my Elbrus Race training. I also use it for training for my speed ascents on Colorado 14'ers and Utah Wasatch Front peaks.

Incline Treadmill Calculator

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If you have access to a Nordic Track or Freemotion Incline Trainer, they are able to go up to 40% incline. Some of their models can also do a negative incline of -6%. I've noticed though that the console report for vertical feet gained is a little off from the math as the incline gets steeper. I think this is because of their internal parts just counting passes of the sensor and doing integer math, instead of our Javascript calculator doing floating point math on the total miles and time. If anyone working for the company can explain it, I'd love to see the answer in a comment below.

7,167' in 114:06 (a little less than 2 hours) and 4.64 miles
If you don't have access to a steep incline treadmill, an average commercial treadmill should be able to do 15%. Let me quick explain the percentage of grade. This is the number of feet of vertical change over the distance of horizontal change. For example, if you walk 1000' and end up 10' higher, this is a 1% grade. Highway passes are rated for grade, with 6% or more being fairly steep for many trucks.

Riding the Incline Treadmill with Wireless Earphones

10% of a mile would be 528'. If you were to ride your treadmill for 2 miles at 10% you'd be going 1056' of uphill travel. As you can see, this can be quite a workout and an incline treadmill can be great training for mountain hiking.


Minimalist footwear is great to strengthen the feet for incline treadmill use
If you'd like to see some great example Incline Treadmill Workouts, check my posts here and at my OTHER BLOG for some of my own Incline Treadmill Workouts. Remember, stay safe when working out and don't do something that isn't good for you. YMMV.

Comments

  1. Thank you for the valuable calculator. Can you provide the script for it? Cheers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The reason for this discrepancy is that you are using the incorrect distance in your calculation. The distance your treadmill records at an incline is not the same as the flat, horizontal distance. At low inclines, these are roughly the same value, but not so at really high inclines.

    If L = the distance as recorded by your treadmill, and i = incline (e.g. 0.05 for 5% incline), then the correct formula to calculate elevation gain (h) is:
    h = L*sin*(arctan(i))

    Compared to this calculator, where h = L * i

    As an example, take a look at the discrepancy in elevation gain between the two formulas at two different inclines:

    5% incline, 1 mile: 0.0499 mi (correct formula), 0.05 mi (incorrect formula)
    40% incline, 1 mile: 0.371 mi (correct formula), 0.40 mi (incorrect formula)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Makes perfect sense. Thanks so much for dropping this comment here. Appreciate it.

      Delete
  3. I did 743 vt feet on 6 Incline
    For 60 minutes on speed 2.5 so how do i do the Calculation

    ReplyDelete

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