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There are several treadmill incline benefits, but the best of all is burning more calories!

A while back, I read an interesting statistic that increasing the incline on your treadmill by 2% will burn 25% more calories. Today, I put that to the test in a controlled experiment.

At my usual pace of 3.3 MPH, I walked for 20 minutes (1.09 miles) with no incline. The treadmill console displayed 115 calories burned and 36.2 fat calories burned.

I reset the treadmill and walked another 20 minutes at 3.3 MPH, but with an incline of 3%. This time it said I burned 143 calories and 44.9 fat calories.

(143 – 115) / 115 = .2435

(44.9-36.2) / 36.2 = .2403

Pretty darn close to 25%! (Assuming of course that the treadmill programming is realistic.)

The extra calories burned during a 20 minute workout isn’t much, but add that up over a longer workout several times a week, and it really starts to make a difference.

So the next time you are on your treadmill, kick up the incline 2% and burn those extra calories.