Life Fitness X5 Elliptical Cross-Trainer
We had a Horizon treadmill that my husband used quite a bit. But every time I'd try to use the thing, I'd have to hold on to the handrails because I felt like I was going to fall off. And every second seemed to last minutes. My feet hurt and my hips were in agony. Needless to say, I didn't use it much; probably less than 3 hours total in the years we had it, and that's a generous estimate.
I had looked at ellipticals when we were thinking about getting the treadmill, but my husband preferred the treadmill, so we got that instead. This was about 5 years ago.
Last year, when I finally got serious and lost 60-odd pounds through dieting, I started looking at ellipticals again. This time my husband was more receptive of the idea. We gave the treadmill to charity and got a Life Fitness X5. We chose that model rather than the X1 or X3 because it has adjustable stride length. I've got long legs & a short-ish torso, so even a 20" stride feels uncomfortably short to me. He prefers a shorter stride as he usually works out at a higher speed than I do.
I can't praise this machine enough. It is solid, heavy, and extremely well-built. I love the smooth motion, and I have never felt off-balance. Whereas doing even 10 minutes on the treadmill was agony and a fight for every second, I've comfortably spent over an hour on the elliptical several times. Once I did 2+ hours (albeit at the low end of my target heartrate, but I was constantly moving) during a particularly gossipy phone call with my sister. My ear and arm got tired. The rest of me was fine.
I usually try for about a 30-45 minute workout at around 85% target hear rate. I've noticed a huge difference in muscle tone (and weight) since we got it in June 2011.
One downside has been what I understand to be a common complaint with ellipticals, which is toe numbness (lots on Google about it). It's definitely not specific to this machine. It was worst when we first began using the machine, with improvement after a couple of weeks of use. I still have occasional numbness, but only in one foot, which has some long-term arch and metatarsal problems going on anyway, so I don't think it's the machine. My cousin has a different machine (Yowza Elliptical) with articulating footpads, and she mentioned some initial numbness as well. (FWIW, if we could have gotten the Yowzas in the UK, we'd probably have gone with it instead, but we'd already got the X5 before she told me about hers.)
I do have one minor complaint specific to the X5: the Advanced Console. We paid an extra £200 for it so we could each store our profile and have heart rate monitoring. It does the job and I like the heart rate monitor support, but for the money, I would have expected it to have a much better user interface. Most annoying thing about it is when you're adjusting numbers up or down, say for calorie targets. It's done by keypress, and you have a choice of pressing the key once to increment the calorie count by one, or holding it down to do a rapid count. But the fast count is far too fast, and it's very difficult to stop the counter where you want it. Say I want to do 500 calories as a target. If I hold down the key for a split-second too long, the target goes up to 1400 or 1500. It's such a pain to get the count down to where it should be that sometimes I leave it at 1500 or 1900 or wherever it stopped and just do mental subtraction after the workout. Not ideal for that kind of money. But the Advanced Console is optional. The machine comes with a Basic Console at no extra charge. I don't think it has the heart rate monitor support, though, and it doesn't have profile storage.
Having said all the above, I want to make it clear that I *love* this machine. I think I'd be about 20 pounds heavier without it, and I've lost a LOT of inches with it. I can wear my "test" jeans; the ones that had the tags still on them for 5 years because they were too small when I got them in the first place! Tried 'em on just before I started using the elliptical and there was about a 4-inch gap between the button and the button-hole at the waist. Now they're too big in the butt and loose around the thighs.
But the biggest difference I've noticed has been that other people have noticed. Even though I'd lost 60ish pounds before we got the machine, no one had really seemed to notice, or at least I hadn't received that many comments. Within a month of getting the machine, though, I started hearing lots of "you've lost a lot of weight, haven't you??" comments. That's a good feeling!
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