How to do the incline treadmill walking
Walking uphill on a treadmill gets your heart rate into a useful range with almost none of the impact cost of running. It is easy to recover from, easy to do while tired from lifting, and easy to repeat exactly week after week.
- Type
- Cardio
- Level
- Beginner
- Equipment
- Treadmill
- Works
- Glutes and Calves
- Also worked
- Hamstrings, Quadriceps, and Abdominals
- Also called
- Incline Walk, 12-3-30, and Hill Walking
Before you start
- Start with a flat walk for three to five minutes to warm up.
- Set a speed you can hold comfortably — usually between 4.5 and 6 km/h, or 3 to 3.5 mph.
- Raise the incline until the effort feels moderately hard but you can still speak in short sentences.
How to do it
- Stand tall and let your arms swing naturally by your sides.
- Take normal-length steps and roll through the whole foot rather than staying on your toes.
- Do not hold the handrails — gripping them takes a large chunk of the work away.
- Come back down to a flat walk for the last few minutes rather than stopping dead.
Cues that help
- Hands off the rails. If you need them, lower the incline.
- Effort you could hold for the whole session, not a sprint you have to bail out of.
- Same speed and grade every week is what makes the sessions comparable.
Common mistakes
Holding on
Leaning on the handrails can cut the actual work by a third or more while the display keeps telling you it was hard.
Chasing steeper and steeper grades
Past around 12 to 15 percent most people start walking on their toes and hanging off the front. Add time instead.
Trusting the calorie readout
Treadmill calorie estimates are guesses. Log time, distance and grade, and let the trend be the measurement.
How to progress it
Add five minutes to the session before you add a percent of grade. A reasonable build is 20 minutes to start, working up to 45, then increasing the incline once that is comfortable.
How to track it
Log distance and duration, and put the incline in the notes so a session at 10 percent is not silently compared against one at 3 percent.
Log your incline treadmill walking
Opens the cardio form with Incline Walk already filled in. Free account, no card.
Incline Treadmill Walking questions
Is incline walking as good as running?
For aerobic fitness at the same effort and duration, it is close, and it costs your joints far less. Running still builds more running-specific fitness.
What about the 12-3-30 workout?
It is incline walking with fixed numbers — 12 percent grade, 3 mph, 30 minutes. It works because it is repeatable, not because those numbers are special.
Can I do it on the same day as lifting?
Yes. It is one of the few cardio options that adds almost nothing to your recovery debt.