Perhaps you've heard about the many ways an elliptical training device can help your health. Maybe you've seen a good example of an elliptical trainer on an infomercial and have decided that you need one for yourself. This is a good call. Elliptical training machines are excellent exercise gear. But to get the best elliptical gear for your personal use, it would be good to first look into elliptical reviews.

It would be entirely too easy to say that cyberspace is the first place to look for reliable reviews. But before you wade into the mess of words and pages that makes up the World Wide Web, you need to know how to distinguish between good reviews and bad reviews. There are a couple of pointers to remember when deciding if the elliptical reviews you are browsing through are reliable or not.

First: Be sure you're looking through a reliable review site. Websites that have been around for a while, and have a large content base (meaning, a large number of articles in stock), are generally more reliable than small ones that have only a few articles to show for themselves. Sites like ConsumerSearch.com and Ellipticaltrainers.com are good places to start. For one thing, they both feature up to date information, compiled by professional researchers. These sites not only feature research information, but also the word of experts. In the case of experts who pitch in their two cents when it comes to elliptical trainers, they are usually health and physical training instructors.

Second: Be discriminate. When you're looking through reviews, you can usually spot which articles or comments are simply press releases, and which are informed and intelligent comments made by other experienced users of the specific product you're trying to research about. You can find this out if you notice the same user (or number of users, even!) singing praises about a specific product over and over, in the same sloppy style. This may mean that a certain distributor has employed someone to sing its praises on various review sites. Or! This may simply mean that the product you have your eye on is simply worth your time and attention!

Third: Participate. Should you happen to find an active and reliable site or forum - as in a message board, or mailing list - make an effort to participate in the discussion. Many sites and forums that are sales-oriented try consciously to restrict their posts to specific product-related topics, such as elliptical reviews, so this is fertile ground for useful information. It isn't mandatory at all, but sharing your knowledge in the kinds of exercise gear you've tried before will build your reputation in a community of people who happen to be also interested in exercise equipment.