Inclines

I ran for years at a 0% incline on treadmills while training indoors. I lived in Virginia, which is relatively flat as well, and I didn’t notice it much, though I wasn’t checking much. My speed increasing outside seemed to correlate with being able to push faster on the treadmill (when I had a 20 minute limit at the gym), so I thought everything was OK.

Then my wife told me a few years ago that running at 0% was like running downhill and not good. So I would put it at 0.5% when I thought of it, but that didn’t happen often, and I didn’t worry about it.

Recently we’ve been sharing the treadmill at home as my wife tries to do the every day running thing with me. And she tends to run at 2%, which I didn’t notice at first, but one day I hit the wrong button near the end of a run and saw that I had been running at 2% and wasn’t really any more winded. Running 1.2-1.5 miles isn’t a lot, so perhaps it would make more of a difference if I ran more, but since I don’t, who cares.

I started tracking my incline, but I was curious if it mattered. So I searched around and found this analysis. The conclusion is that running at 0% seems to be like track running, which is really what I’d like to simulate. It cites work done in a couple books and at the low speeds we run, even up to 15mph winds don’t seem to affect us, which is one of the reasons given for running at 1-2%.

The author says that you should run at an incline as needed for your training, not for any compensation for running inside.

This page is interesting in that it says 1% incline adds 4% more effort. Not much for any workout, but over a lifetime, that’s a lot of extra calories. Means I can still enjoy pizza!