When are cheap treadmills a wise purchase? Anytime that adding exercise to an otherwise sedentary activity sounds like a good idea. Sure there are tons of new treadmills coming out each and every year, but let's face it, a treadmill is a treadmill, a moving belt that, if all goes as designed and planned, will move at a rate equal to the opposite movement of the user.

So, is buying a cheap treadmill worth it? That depends on how cheap the treadmill is and how cheaply you can buy it for. If you're unsure whether you'd be able to make the most of having a treadmill, or just plain don't know if a treadmill is something for you or not, then the cheaper the treadmill, the better.

If you're not sure whether owning a treadmill will work into your lifestyle at all, but really want to give it a shot, then why not pick up a severely outdated and inexpensive one to try out. Even better, borrow an old treadmill from a friend to try out for a few weeks.

There are so many old, once top of the line, now cheap, treadmills sitting around in garages across the country. This is the perfect supply for your own treadmill test. Will you benefit from having a treadmill, or will it simply collect dust? This question is ultimately and continually up to you, but choosing the right type of exercise can make a huge difference in your ability to motivate yourself.

So you've got Aunt Ida's creaky old treadmill out of her garage and lugged it onto a truck. Now it's sitting in your living room and you're not sure how to best determine if this contraption is going to help you at all. Here's a fun experiment: Every time you would normally sit to watch television, get on the treadmill and walk for the whole time you're watching TV.

You don't have to walk fast enough to break a sweat. In fact, you shouldn't so fast that it would hinder keeping up a conversation at all. Did you know that walking only one to two miles per hour doubles your metabolic rate? This means that simply adding some walking to daily life we can seriously turn up our metabolic furnaces, without changing into gym clothes and without having to sweat or shower.

One way to find cheap treadmills is to browse through items at garage and rummage sales. These are the best places to find cheap anything, and treadmills have a special attraction to the garage sale, being that many of them end up sitting in the owner's garage long before the garage sale. Let their mis-purchase be your treasure. Instead of spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a new treadmill, get cheap treadmills from those that don't want theirs; you'll be recycling and saving money at he same time.

Also, especially if you live in a big city, ask around at fitness equipment supply places or gyms, as to where the used fitness equipment goes after gyms no longer want the units. Buying a second hand treadmill is a great way to save money, yet get something more state of the art than the dusty twenty year old treadmill from someone's garage.