At home I run on Proform treadmill that I bought used on eBay. My treadmill has a few features, but it is older, noisy, and overall pretty basic. I don’t usually workout anywhere else. But my wife and I were celebrating our 13th wedding anniversary, and were staying as the Marriott hotel in Niagara Falls on the Canada side. Even though we were out of town, I still had a running schedule to follow. The website for the hotel said they had a fitness room, but didn’t give details. So one of the first things I looked at when exploring the hotel, was the fitness room. They had two Life Fitness 95te treadmills, a Life Fitness 95xe elliptical trainer, and a couple Life Fitness exercise bikes. But since I was only interested in running, I only used the treadmill.
The Life Fitness 95te is very cool and has a lot of features my Proform doesn’t. First, the thing is pretty quiet. That was a nice change. The side of the 95te treadmill says Flex Deck Shock Adsorption System. I didn’t notice much difference than my Proform as far as how hard the deck is. It was comfortable to run on.
It has a touchscreen which was interesting. I got started by touching the screen. It asked me some questions such as my weight, and what mode I wanted to use. It also asked me whether I wanted to limit my run by time, or distance. I always chose distance, since that’s what my running schedule goes by.
I was able to watch TV on the touchscreen. I used the headphones from my mp3 player. I wish I had had some headphones with a longer cord.
The mode I mainly used was the Manual mode. But some of the other modes were Fat Burn, Cardio, Hill, Random, Fit Test, Personal Trainer, and Zone Training.
Fat Burn and Cardio work similarly to each other. You set the speed, and then it will raise or lower the incline of the treadmill to adjust the intensity of the workout to keep your heart rate near a percentage of your theoretical max heart rate. For the Fat Burn mode, the percentage is 65%, and for the cardio it is 80%.
The Hill and Random modes will raise and lower the incline of the treadmill. The Hill mode has a predefined course with 4 phases. The Random mode has randomly created hills, so the workout is different each time.
There are a bunch of sub modes for the Fit Test mode. They are Life Fitness Fit Test, Army, Gerkin (for fire fighters), Navy, PEB (for law enforcement such as FBI), Marine, and Air Force. I did the Life Fitness Fit Test, which had me walk for about a minute at 0% incline, then it raised the incline to 5%, and I walk at grade for another 4 or 5 minutes. The treadmill monitored my heart rate. I first did it at the default 2mph, but it said my heart rate was too low, and to do it again at a faster speed. So I did it again at 4.5mph. It said I was above average. I don’t know what the other potential results are, or if that is the best one. Of course, I had run 5 miles this morning, and had already been playing on the treadmill with the other modes. So who knows? I am scheduled to run 10 miles tomorrow, so I may try the fat burn, or the cardio mode.
Another neat feature of the Life Fitness 95te is that it is compatible with my Polar heart hate monitor chest strap. I had brought my watch down with me, but found my heart displaying on the screen also. So for my next workouts, I just wore the chest strap, and left the watch in my room.
I wish I had one of these Life Fitness treadmills at home.

Posted by Rob in Reviews on April 17th, 2007 |