My wife really wants a treadmill. I don't know much about them to be honest. Looking for suggestions on what to look for in one. Is their a way to get your milage from one?
My wife really wants a treadmill. I don't know much about them to be honest. Looking for suggestions on what to look for in one. Is their a way to get your milage from one?
When my wife wanted one, I found the best one that I could hang coats and jackets on. I was not wrong as it got used more for that than walking upon...
In reply to preach (fs) :
I am pretty sure my wife will use it. She used to be a somewhat serious runner.
Get a commercial grade one if you really expect it to get used. The consumer grade ones will not hold up to regular use for very long.
In reply to secretariata (Forum Supporter) :
Those are pretty painfully expensive tbh unless I am missing something. Seeing $2k plus for one.
Is buying a second hand one off Facebook marketplace a bad idea?
In reply to 93EXCivic :
Not a bad idea at all.
Have gyms been forced to close in your area due to covid?
Going out of business sale for pro equipment?
Most residential stuff gets lightly used for 2 months and then sits idle for 5 years.
Spend some time looking at the FB pictures of the seller. It should be pretty evident if they were the type of person using it lightly.
No. I'd actually strongly suggest that.
I bought one off Craigslist probably 6-7 years ago. It is not hard to find one that has been lightly used. As noted above, most become coat racks. You can go through several second hand ones before you ever approach the cost of a new one. With everyone moving to the fancy Peloton style interactive ones I suspect the plain Jane models will be ever more available. I used mine semi-daily for the last five or so years. It's sat since the pandemic as I was walking a lot and now is buried in the midst of some carpentry work downstairs. I set a limit of $150 for a used one and scored mine for around $125 IIRC. Looked barely used.
When the pandemic hit and I was home all the time I bought a Horizon T101. It was ~$700 including delivery.
When I got it I was running on it and it handled it fine. Lately I am more into walking for a little longer duration and it's been a good machine so far. It's about 6 months old and has a few hundred miles on it without problems.
Check for used equipment or sports consignment stores in your area, my wife has been getting stuff from Play It Again Sports and they have good deals on commercial grade equipment often.
The homeowner grade cheap treadmills will certainly be functional, but an avid runner will notice the quality difference. They have a lot of flex and bounce in the frame/deck since they're built lighter. The motor and controls are cheaper, so there's less fine speed control and you will notice the motor bogging easily. A complaint my wife has about our cheap unit is that changing the speed up or down is very slow and unresponsive, making it hard or impossible to do certain training programs.
But, we've had the cheapo for four years or so now, and it still works just fine even after being used close to once a week on average.
I know they're a nice place to hang freshly ironed shirts ......
They can be fairly readily turned into belt sanders...
Buying used worked out really well for us. 15 years ago when our first kid came along my wife wanted one to make it a little easier to keep running. Like others above I assumed it would be a coat rack. To my surprise she used it a ton and really enjoyed it. We bought it for $300, never had a single issue with it and sold it a few months back for $350 within an hour of posting it for sale. Buying used allowed us to buy a much better quality unit than we could have bought new.
In reply to 93EXCivic :
As others mentioned used 1-2 year old commercial grade stuff can be very cost effective. That's what we did. Got it online from some place that specialized in used gym equipment. They had good descriptions & photos of their inventory. I think we paid about 40% of new, including shipping. I spent about 50 minutes per day, 5-6 days per week for 8 years or so at a fast walk (just short of running about 3.2-3.3 mph). Need to clean it off & get my @ss back on it...
The worst part about buying one off of CL was that it was awkward and heavy.
Only bummer with our Precor 9.23(er... .25?) is that the built in heart rate system is useless, and Precor support told us it would work with a cheap Polar heart rate strap, which is only true of the otherwise similar 9.27.
My only comment... they are heavy as f'ing hell! Oh, and they do make good clothes racks too.
If it will seriously be used, look for one that has a wide and long tread. Went through a couple myself and found most consumer ones (the ones that are affordable new) I had problems with the width of the tread and the length of the tread. You know me, I'm not as tall as you. Just under 6ft. But do have bad knees and feet so the wider and longer ones helped keep me from stumbling. Commercial ones meet this. Before this pandemic closed up everything around here I saw that the local Y was upgrading their equipment so maybe those may be on the market, don't know. It has been almost a year since then and SWMBO won't go back to the gym until all this is over.
Downside of commercial treadmills is they don't fold up easily and take more room. So they don't work quite as well to hand your clothes on.
In reply to wlkelley3 :
Thanks. I'll keep an eye. Mostly for the wife though. I do my cardio on a bike. I personally hate treadmills.
With my knees, I prefer recumbent bike myself.
I picked up a broken one not long ago for free. It was local on facebook. Needed a $3 fusible link piece on the power cord. Then a couple of months later I had to replace the belt as the wife wore it out. That was fairly cheap as well. This is the wrong time of the year to try and find one. Everybody has that loosing weight New Years resolution thing going on.
Funny you ask - Just went down the treadmill rabbit hole and here is what I found.
For new, I would recommend the most expensive SOLE or NordicTrack you can find. For used commercial, Matrix, Life Fitness, True, and Precor are going to be some of the good ones.
So what I did was I found the wife a used commercial grade unit. Hotel take-out, off-lease Life Fitness CLST Integrity with the TV. Has 12,000 miles on it. Belt life is 30,000 miles, deck life is 60,000 miles so I think we are good for a while. Got it for $1,100 which is a fair priced this time of year in Wisconsin. Brought it home from North Chicago. If you are in Chicago area, I have a guy...
A few notes about the commercial grade units
Be forewarned. Its huge. Fortunately we have the space. Lay it out in advance.
Its a heavy SOB - 400 lbs. I got myself and my biggest bestest crossfittest bro and we were able to wrestle it downstairs after significant disassembly.
The build quaility is impressive. We had a NordicTrack elliptical followed up by the highest end SOLE elliptical you can get and they were OK. Lots of plastic in important locations, odd and cheap fasteners, etc. This unit is a tank. All grade 8 standard thread fasteners, no metric BS or weird cheap stuff. Really nice trim pieces with the cast-in captured nuts, not just threads into plastic. There is a keeper that holds the cord in. There are 6x 1/2" bolts that hold the uprights to the base. The base is one big weldment, not bolted or other crap.
The other thing I like is the commercial units don't have all the geegaws to attract Susie Q Homeowner. No bluetooth speakers. No subscription based programming. Set it up, plug it in, and go.
This unit but with a TV above the controls.
I have a Precor that I purchased about 20 years ago after an *almost* heart attack. My heart doc recommended it because it was what he and several other doctors he worked with owned. Mine has been used moderately and has never needed any kind of service.
YMMV
I had a Sole F80 I bought new. This was a few years ago, paid around $1500 for it at a local retailer. I did a fair amount of research beforehand before settling on that particular one. Although I usually set it on manual and ran until I was gassed, it did have several programs with varying levels of torture, available. It also came with a heart rate monitor. Oh they also marketed it as a "folding" treadmill, however it didn't quite fold up completely vertical. Being I mostly ran vs walking on it, I gave it a good steady pounding (don't get cute with that :) ) for about 2 years. I wound up selling it (for a good price) not because anything was wrong with it, but rather I just got bored with looking at the same thing every time I ran on it.
Running and biking outdoors has since taken the boredom factor away completely.
A bonus of NordicTrack is that many are iFit compatible, meaning for a newer one, the treadmill can adjust incline, etc automatically as part of the workout. They offer both canned and live classes. I'd at least look at a demo before you decide, we got it a few weeks ago and it takes some of the boredom out of exercising.
We have an ancient NordicTrack elite that we bought used about 8 years ago, and has held up very well. They are super heavy to move, so just be prepared for that!
Got the wife's treadmill moved down to the basement this weekend. See that frame? 100% and powdercoated steel - no plastic there!
Runs really really nice and smooth, very heavy and doesnt move at all even under full tilt boogie. One thing I did learn - actually remembered - was that these rigs dissipate static thru the ground and between that and a VFD do not place nice with a GFCI outlet. Had an Oh E36 M3 moment when I hit "run" and it immediately tripped the GFCI. Fixed that and back to the races.
So not only do you need a 20A service for these but you also need an outlet with no GFCI.
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