Empowering Your Knowledge - What's in a Treadmill/Elliptical Name

What's in a Treadmill/Elliptical Name
Besides the Landice naming fiasco which you can read here, naming conventions for treadmills and ellipticals are in general, very hard to understand if you don't look at them day and night (i.e someone like me). Here's a quick guide:

Treadmills

There is no industry consensus on how a particular model should be named. It is generally up to the company behind the treadmill to create their own convention. There are however, general trends that you can observe across many models.

Basically, a treadmill most commonly takes one of the three forms:

BRAND+LETTER+NUMBER+TREADMILL
BRAND+NUMBER+LETTER+TREADMILL
BRAND+LETTER+NUMBER+LETTER2+TREADMILL

So for example,

Sole F63 Treadmill
Smooth 9.25HR Treadmill
Endurance T10HRC Treadmill

So what good does this do for you, the buyer? Well, just by looking at the name, you can determine how the treadmill fares against the other models in its own brand and occasionally determine what functions it comes with.

Let's take a look at our first example: Sole F63 Treadmill.

Sole is the brand. F63 is the model. Treadmill is well, a treadmill. The main things that you can get out of this are the following:

1. If there's a "F" within the name, it often means that you can fold it up to save space. This isn't always the case but it's right most of the time.

2. The "F" also serves another function. It's used to distinguish itself as within the "F"(olding) series of the Sole Brand. Sole’s non folding treadmills use the letters "S" and "TT" instead of “F”.

3. 63 is the level of the treadmill within its own line. By itself, the number 63 is meaningless but if you look at the other models in its lineup including the Sole F80, Sole F83 and Sole F85, 63 is the lowest of them all and thus you can usually assume it to be the weakest of the lineup by virtue of fact that it’s the lowest number.

You will often see HR or HRC attached to the name like in our other two examples, the Smooth 9.25HR treadmill and the Endurance T10HRC treadmill. HR stands for Heart Rate and HRC stands for Heart Rate Control. What this means is that these machines either carry a heart rate monitor or a heart rate control of some sort. Many models do have heart rate monitors or heart rate control even if they're not explicitly stated in their names. Therefore you shouldn't automatically assume that if it doesn't have HR in its name, it doesn't carry a heart rate function.

Finally, if you see a “T” or “E” at the beginning or the end of the model number, it usually signifies that it’s a treadmill or elliptical respectively.

For those of you looking for a treadmill made by Icon Fitness (Epic,Reebok,Proform,Weslo,Image,NordicTrack), you might occasionally encounter a treadmill listed as something like WLTL0153 or PFTL311040. These are not the treadmill's model name but rather, it's a form of unique identification for ICON’s products. You probably won't find much information if you're searching using these special codes. In case you're wondering, WLTL stands for WesLo TreadmilL and PFTL stands for ProForm TreadmilL.

Ellipticals

Ellipticals basically follow the naming convention used for treadmills. There are however a few particular things that are unique to an elliptical.

Where a treadmill is a treadmill, an elliptical is also an elliptical trainer, a cross trainer or a crosstrainer or in some cases an elliptical crosstrainer. They all mean the same thing. Additionally, an elliptical can use a front, rear and in some cases a center drive. That’s why you’ll sometimes see “front”, “rear” or “center” as part of the elliptical’s name.

So there you have it!