Treadmills and elliptical trainers are the two most popular pieces of cardio exercise equipment both at the gym and in homes. They’re renowned for giving a great cardio workout, and you can’t really go wrong in choosing either one.

But let’s say you prefer the treadmill. Is it possible to lose weight just by walking on this machine? Well, yes, it is possible. But there are a few things you’ll need to know to make sure you’re not wasting your time.

The first mistake many people make when trying to lose weight by treadmill walking is increasing their calories after starting the exercise program. Treadmills will help you to lose weight by allowing your body to use up more calories than you take in. However, walking does not burn as many calories as say, triathlon training or a game of racquetball. Even so, many walkers think they need to use some of the dietary ‘training ads’ intended for participants in more intense sporting activities.

If you decide to ‘fuel’ your walking session by having an energy bar beforehand and a protein shake afterwards, you may be cancelling out the caloric deficit caused by your treadmill workout, and therefore not lose any weight.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating starving yourself. This is counter-productive and will just make your body start holding onto fat because it thinks there’s a famine going on. But eat your regular amount of calories or slightly less, and make it good clean food, not junk, in order to see weight loss from treadmill walking.

Also, in order to lose weight from treadmill walking, you’ll need to exercise hard enough to get into your “fat burning zone”, which is from 60-80 percent of your maximum heart rate. Just strolling easily on the machine will probably accomplish little visible weight loss, unless you can do it for six hours a day. Try and get to a point where you could just barely carry on a conversation. If you can sing, you’re going too slow, and if you can’t talk, you’re going too fast – unless you’re doing interval training.

What is interval training? With this type of workout, you would raise the intensity of the walking, say to a jog, for anywhere from 20 seconds to a few minutes, then return to easier walking for about the same amount of time. Continue alternating work and rest periods. By interspersing these hard and easy phases, you can get the same weight loss benefits from a 20 minute workout that it would take 45 minutes to an hour to achieve at a slower pace. That’s because interval workouts cause your body to burn more calories around the clock, rather than just during the workout as with the longer and easier walking sessions. If you do choose to use intervals, then try over time to make the work periods harder, decrease the rest periods, or both, in order to burn even more fat, which is of course what losing weight is all about.

To learn more about using a treadmill, or anything having to do with health and fitness, check out the Health and Fitness Guide at http://www.thehealthandfitnessguide.com