In addition to burning calories, exercising on a treadmill can help you improve your cardiovascular health in a variety of ways. The American Heart Association recommends that you exercise three times per week at a vigorously intense level of work, like aerobic exercise, or five times per week at a moderately intense level, like brisk walking. A treadmill lets you do both, as well as sprint train, for a total cardio workout.
Increase Endurance
Using a treadmill, you can increase your cardiovascular endurance, or stamina, which is your capacity to exercise over a period of time. The easiest way to increase your cardiovascular capacity on a treadmill is simply by beginning with low speed and incline settings, adding a few minutes each day as you build up fitness. After a week or so, you should be able to increase your intensity a bit more quickly.
A treadmill will allow you work at the same speed but increase your heart rate by increasing the incline of the machine, simulating jogging or running up a hill, which is harder to do. Or you can keep the same incline but increase your speed.
Using a combination of length of workout, speed and incline settings, you can build cardiovascular endurance on a treadmill.
Lower Cholesterol Levels
Once you have the stamina to exercise at 70 to 80 percent of your maximum heart rate for approximately 15 minutes or more, you'll be able to do aerobic workouts. According to the Mayo Clinic and other health organizations, aerobic exercise helps raise high density lipids (HDL) in your blood, also known as the "good" cholesterol.
Improve Recovery
If you play sports like soccer, basketball, football, volleyball or tennis, your heart is called on to do work at high levels of intensity (80 to 90 percent of your maximum heart rate) for short periods of time, with longer rests in between. In fact, during a tennis match, most of the time you are on the court you are not playing but are recovering in between points. Your ability to catch your breath, recover and start the next play or point is critical in these sports, and anaerobic, or sprint training, is necessary to do this.
On a treadmill, you'll want to increase your speed to get to your anaerobic heart rate for 60 to 120 seconds, depending on your fitness level, resting with a slow walk for 90 seconds to two minutes before your next set. If you are new to exercise, you can add two or three sprint sessions to a 30-minute workout.
Training in this way can be dangerous if you are not familiar with your treadmill, because of the high speed of the running surface during your sprints. If you don't pay attention to your feet while you're trying to hit the stop button, or you are manually turning up the pace and slowing it down each time, you may fall off the treadmill.
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