Share this
Twitter
Myspace
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Slashdot
Furl
Yahoo
Technorati
Newsvine
Facebook
Export PDF
Print
E-mail
Tags
Here’s a word of warning for people who exercise on treadmills: Watch your step!
It turns out that treadmills are not only the most popular piece of exercise equipment people have in their homes; they are also the most dangerous.
According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, some 19,000 people incurred injuries on treadmills serious enough to go to the emergency room in 2009. Almost 6,000 of those serious injuries were to children.
The injuries included broken bones, amputated fingers and concussions.
The 4-year-old daughter of former boxing champion Mike Tyson was killed in 2009 when she was strangled by a cord on the treadmill in his home.
One avid exerciser who found out first hand that treadmills can be hazardous to one’s health is Julie Osborne, who described her experience to Susan Koeppen of “The Early Show” on CBS TV.
Osborne told Koeppen that she “never experienced any kind of pain like” she did when she got three fingers stuck between the frame and the running track on her machine as she tried to step back on with the belt still running.
Her skin was torn off to the point where “I could actually see exposed bone," she said
The use of treadmills in this country has increased nearly 40 percent in the last 10 years, with more than 50 million Americans using them. They seem simple enough to use, but it is also easy to be focused on something else while using them. And that’s when a problem is most likely to taka place.
"It's the distractions that occur while you're on the treadmill that cause most injuries," fitness and treadmill expert Ed Trainor noted.
Trainor said that “a moving belt is like falling off a bicycle at 10 miles an hour” and added that the machine “requires focus and responsibility.”
An article on About.com noted that motorized treadmills pose special dangers because the belt won’t stop until the user hits the stop button or the safety clip disengages. “These extra seconds while a finger is trapped can mean a greater injury as compared to pinching it in a non-motorized piece of exercise equipment,” the article said.
Of course, as topendsports.com points out, if you’re among those who “buy expensive equipment only to end up using it to hang their laundry on,” you don’t need to worry about the danger — unless, of course, you trip over the treadmill reaching for a T-shirt.
—JOE GREENE, NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
