Treadmill workouts can be deceiving. By this I mean that not all treadmill workouts are equal and very often you buy a treadmill to achieve a certain goal and yet no matter how hard you try, that goal keeps on eluding you.

Plan Your Treadmill Workouts

So before you embark on your treadmill workouts, you need to clearly establish in your mind what you are wanting to achieve. Of course a single treadmill workout is unlikely to achieve anything at all (other than being stiff and sore if you overdo it!), but the point is you need to know what you want your treadmill workouts to achieve and then have a plan to achieve it.

For example, you might have bought a treadmill to exercise with the aim of losing weight. There are a variety of treadmill workouts aimed at losing weight, but the reality is that you are unlikely to lose much weight if all you do is start exercising on a treadmill and everything else about your lifestyle remains the same.

Yes, some exercise is better than no exercise, and if you have a lot of weight to lose and you haven't exercised for years, then no doubt you will lose some weight. But there is also no doubt that if you don't make other changes, you wont get near your goal weight simply by doing treadmill workouts - even if you spent half your day, every day, on the machine!

So if your goal is weight loss, then working out on a treadmill is only half the equation. The other half is boosting your metabolism to ensure that your body eats up those calories. After all, the only way you are going to lose the weight is by ensuring that your body uses up more calories than you are feeding it, without your body going into survival mode and hanging onto everything it has.

To help you understand the basics of how you can help turn your body into a fat burning machine, here are three different weight loss programs, any one of which will be a very useful companion to your treadmill workouts and will virtually ensure that you reach your weight loss goals.

I am giving you 3 alternatives because although they have the same underlying philosophy, their methods are quite different. I am hoping that one of them will suit your circumstances and interest you enough to fire you up and get you moving

The Diet Solution is written by a well respected nutritionist and exercise specialist.

Fat Loss 4 Idiots - along the lines of the "for dummies" series that explain the subject in a simple, step by step manner.

Burn The Fat - not for the faint hearted but man will this get your engine firing and the calories burning!This will take and guts, but the results can be nothing short of spectacular!

The Best Type Of Treadmill Workouts

But back to our treadmill workouts.So you have sorted out your goals and have the treadmill ready to roll. Where do you go from here?

If you are a complete novice, haven't exercised for years and are unfit and/or overweight, then probably the first thing you need to do is visit your doctor to make sure that your internal moving part (i.e. your heart), is up to being stressed a bit as you build your fitness. No point buying a treadmill and having a heart attack!

Assuming all is well with your internal economy, and your goal is to improve your fitness level, then the aim of your treadmill workouts should be to maximize the benefit for the effort put in.

The major point to remember here is that more is not better. In other words, if you are spending half an hour on the treadmill 3 days a week, then upping this to an hour or doubling it to 6 days a week is not going to double your results!

It might seem unfair, but that's the way it is . However, the good news is that if you increase your effort for short bursts of time without increasing the overall time that you exercise, then the improvements gained from your treadmill workouts can be quite dramatic.

In short, for maximum benefit, you need to follow the principles of interval training on your treadmill.

That's because the body is an amazing piece of design and it will adapt to whatever circumstances confronts it. So if you hop on your treadmill several times a week and don't vary your routine, your body will adapt to that "stress' fairly quickly and you will no longer feel any benefit

So how do you incorporate interval training in your treadmill workouts? Luckily this is not at all complicated. Nor is there a specific formula, so you can create your own treadmill workouts based on interval training.

In essence, interval training means you push your self hard for a short period of time, then slow right down for a short period of time, then push yourself hard again for a short period of time and then relax again.

To illustrate: Your normal treadmill workout might involve hoping on the treadmill for 20 minutes at a steady pace. By keeping the same 20 minute but simply changing the way you workout, you could radically improve your fitness and fat burning.

All you need to do is warm up for a minute then crank up the pace for a minute (running or walking), then slow to a more gentle pace for a minute, then push the pace again for a minute, then back to a relaxed pace for the next minute - and keep alternating like that every minute until your 20 minutes is up.

Now of course, depending on your treadmill, you could change your pace and/or the gradient to give you the variation in effort. But one thing is for sure, by utilizing this principle, you will greatly enhance the benefits that accrue to you from your treadmill workouts!

Vary Your Treadmill Workouts

Of course, to prevent boredom, not all your treadmill workouts need be the same. As long as you follow the principles of interval training, you can vary the duration and intensity of each workout. But do remember that long treadmill workouts are probably a waste of time when compared to the results you will get with short, interval training based workouts.

Also, don't forget the basic exercise rules of warming up and warming down should be incorporated into your treadmill workouts.

So there you have it. Effective treadmill workouts needn't be long and boring! In fact the best treadmill workouts are short and intermittently intense!