The console reports a percentage. Enter it here for the angle, the rise, and the height you climbed.
Estimates are for general guidance only and are not medical advice. For a personalised plan, book a free guided tour at RPM Gym.
Degrees first, because that is the number people picture and the machine never shows. Six percent is 3.43°. Ten is 5.71°, fifteen is 8.53°, and the shallowest setting on the dial, one percent, is 0.57°. Anyone who reads the console as an angle is imagining roughly twice the slope they are standing on.
What the percentage does say is more useful than the angle anyway. It is a ratio: metres of rise for every 100 metres of horizontal ground. So 6% and six metres per hundred are the same statement written twice, and that version survives mental arithmetic in a way an angle does not.
Height climbed is the row most people came for, and the one most likely to be wrong elsewhere. A treadmill belt measures the surface you travelled along, which is the sloped one, so it is the hypotenuse of the triangle rather than its base. The climb is belt distance times the sine of the angle. Half an hour at 4.8 km/h and 12% covers 2.4 km of belt and gains 286 m, where multiplying belt by grade would have claimed 288.
The horizontal row runs the opposite way to most people's guess. The ground you crossed is always slightly less than the belt says, never more: 3 km of belt at 6% is 2.99 km of floor, and at 15% it is 2.97. Small, and worth having right, because it is the same triangle that gives you the climb.
There is no calorie line on this page and that is a decision, not an omission. Until this session the tool ran an energy model on coefficients that traced back to nothing, and it contradicted our own treadmill calorie page by up to a quarter on the same inputs. Energy needs body weight and gait, neither of which this form asks for. Geometry needs neither.
| 1% to 5% | 0.57° to 2.86° | The shallow end, where the two units look near enough interchangeable that nobody notices they are not. Halving the percentage is a fair approximation in your head here: 5% is 2.86°, and 2.5 would have been close enough to shrug at. |
|---|---|---|
| 6% to 10% | 3.43° to 5.71° | Where a walk becomes a climb while the machine still looks flat from the side. Ten percent sounds like a serious number and is 5.71°, under a fifteenth of a right angle. The look of the deck is a poor guide to what the belt is asking of you. |
| 12% to 15% | 6.84° to 8.53° | The top of the range on most machines: incline typically stops around 12 to 15% on mainstream treadmills. The halving shortcut has quietly broken by here, and it undershoots — 15% is 8.53°, a degree more than the 7.5 the trick predicts. |
| Above 15% | up to 21.8° at 40% | Specialist incline trainers go considerably higher, and 40% is where this tool's input stops. Even at that setting the angle is 21.8°, which is a long way from what 40 suggests to anybody reading the console as degrees. |
angle (degrees) = arctan(grade ÷ 100) rise per 100 m of horizontal run (m) = grade belt distance (km) = speed km/h × minutes ÷ 60 height climbed (m) = belt distance in metres × sin(angle) horizontal distance (km) = belt distance × cos(angle) No energy term. Nothing here computes calories or MET at any setting.
Half an hour at 4.8 km/h with the incline set to 12%.
286 m of vertical gain out of a session that moved you 2.38 km across the floor and nowhere at all. Note what the shortcut would have done: 2,400 × 0.12 gives 288 m, two metres adrift at this grade. Push the setting to 15% over 3 km of belt and the same shortcut says 450 where the answer is 445; at 30% it is out by nearly 40 m. The correction is invisible at the shallow end and grows with every point of grade.
8.53°. Ten percent is 5.71°, five percent is 2.86°, one percent is 0.57°. The conversion is arctan(grade ÷ 100), because the percentage is a ratio of rise to horizontal run rather than an angle. Below about 10% you can halve the percentage in your head and land within a rounding error; past that the trick starts to undershoot.
Convention, and an old one. Exercise testing has specified treadmill grade in percent for decades, the Bruce protocol's first stages running at 10%, 12% and 14%, and gym consoles use the same units. Percent also does easier arithmetic: at 6% you climb six metres in every hundred you cover, which no angle tells you at a glance. Treat it as the industry's convention rather than a published engineering standard, because that is what it is.
Belt distance times the sine of the angle. Three kilometres of belt at 15% is 445 m of climb, not the 450 you get from multiplying distance by grade, because the belt measured the slope and not the ground beneath it. At 6% the two answers agree to the metre. At 30% the shortcut is out by nearly 40 m over the same 3 km.
Mainstream machines typically stop somewhere around 12 to 15%, which is 6.84° to 8.53°. Specialist incline trainers go considerably higher; this tool accepts up to 40%, and that is 21.8°. For a specific machine the manufacturer's spec sheet is the only place the real number lives.
Because you did not change altitude, and a barometric altimeter is reporting that correctly. The deck's angle is not information your watch has. Strava strips elevation from anything tagged as a treadmill run, so the tag is usually what is hiding it. Nothing is broken, and there is no standard definition of treadmill elevation gain for an app to fall back on.
17.6%, which most machines will not reach. Fifteen degrees needs 26.8%, and that is incline-trainer territory. This is the conversion running backwards, and it is worth doing once: the angles people ask for in degrees are far steeper than the percentages they are used to setting.
It is the distance the belt travelled, measured along the deck. On the flat those are identical. At 6% the ground underneath comes to 2.99 km for every 3 km of belt, and at 15% it is 2.97 km. Around a percent at the steep end, which will never change a training decision and does change the climb arithmetic.
Knowing the geometry does not decide the session — which grade you can hold, and for how long, gets settled on the floor. Book a free guided tour at RPM Gym in Al Manhal and try the machines before you plan around them.