About Belt & Bike

Who writes this

Belt & Bike is written and edited by Mike M., the hands-on owner behind Iron Mako Media. Every page on this site carries his byline, and the Person markup in the page source names the same author — the visible page and the machine-readable page agree about who wrote it.

We are going to be unusually plain about what that byline does and does not mean. Mike is not a certified trainer, a physiotherapist, a biomechanist or an equipment engineer, and we will never imply otherwise. Those credentials are easy to claim on the internet and trivially falsifiable, and a site that invents them has told you something important about itself on page one.

What we actually do

• Read specifications carefully and cite them. Continuous horsepower versus peak, deck dimensions against stride length, capacity ratings against dynamic load. Most of the value on this site is in taking published figures seriously.
• Pull live prices. Every price comes from a live Amazon data feed with the date it was verified, and expires on its own if the feed stops.
• Apply one published rubric across 70 machines, so scores are comparable. See our methodology.
• Say when a figure is missing. A surprising number of listings omit horsepower, deck size or capacity. Our tables print “not published by manufacturer” rather than an estimate.

What we do not do

• We do not test machines. There is no lab, no warehouse and no fleet of treadmills. We do not own these products.
• We do not publish testimonials or reader reviews. We have none, and inventing them would be the fastest possible way to deserve no trust at all.
• We do not invent prices, ratings or review counts. Prices render only from the live feed; where none resolves, the page says “check price”.
• We do not give medical advice. Where a page touches joints, rehabilitation or exercise prescription, it cites published clinical resources and says the program should come from a clinician.

Why we compete on methodology

The obvious move for a site like this would be to claim hands-on testing. We cannot do that honestly, so we compete on the thing that needs no lab: a published, reproducible method. Every threshold we apply — 3.0 CHP for running, 60 inches of deck above five foot eight, 30 to 40 lb of flywheel, 50 to 100 lb of capacity margin — is written down, explained, and linked from the page that uses it. You can disagree with a threshold and see exactly what changes if you do.

How the site is funded

Reader-funded through affiliate links. When you buy through a link here we may earn a commission from the retailer at no extra cost to you. That funding never decides a ranking: where Amazon is cheaper than a brand-direct option we send you to Amazon, and where we think the honest answer is “buy nothing” or “buy a different category of machine entirely”, we say that. Two of our guides carry no product links at all, because attaching a buy button to safety content would be worse than earning nothing. Full disclosure.

The publisher

Belt & Bike is published by Iron Mako Media. An independent, reader-funded publisher run by Mike M. under Iron Mako Media.

The site, in numbers

101 content pages across 6 sections, covering 70 machines. Every page is reachable within three clicks of the homepage, and the full index is here.

Get in touch

Corrections are genuinely welcome. If we have a specification wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say so. Email contact@beltandbike.com or use the contact form.