Do you have a gym membership, and if so, do you use it? Most of us sign up with the best of intentions, but now use that key fob to access the smoothie bar or do a furtive 20 minutes on the treadmill every few weeks. We’re too busy at work to fit in fitness, even if we know it would do us — and our productivity — a lot of good. Fortunately, it turns out, we don’t have to leave the office to get in a workout.
A recent article in the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health & Fitness Journal mapped out a seven-minute routine that uses only body weight, a chair, and a wall to achieve a high-intensity workout that might work just as well as a longer exercise routine.
“There’s very good evidence” that such a workout provides “many of the fitness benefits of prolonged endurance training but in much less time,” says Chris Jordan, co-author of the article and the director of exercise physiology at the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, Fla., in an interview with the New York Times.
To get the benefits, you should do the twelve exercises in the sequence, allowing 30 seconds for each and taking a 10-second rest.
The good news is that you’re done after seven minutes; the bad news is that Jordan tells the Times that those seven minutes should be “unpleasant.” He recommends hovering at about an 8 out of 10 on the discomfort scale during the workout.
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(Photo Credit: mikeschmid/Flickr)
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