FWF: Scientifically-proven and under 10 minutes (Free Workout Fridays)

The Scientific 7-Minute Workout (NY Times blog)

I’m finding a lot of free workouts out there. How many of them can claim to be “scientifically proven” and take less than 10 minutes? Well, recently I found 2 of them, from different sources, making very similar claims.

First there’s The Scientific 7-Minute Workout, presented by the New York Times health/science blog Well. The big news here is that “In 12 exercises deploying only body weight, a chair and a wall, it fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort, which essentially combines a long run and a visit to the weight room into about seven minutes of steady discomfort — all of it based on science.” Remember that: A long run and a visit to the weight room, in seven minutes!

I did this workout a couple of days in a row. The first time, I was planning to do a 45-minute Insanity workout (Wasting all that extra time, maybe?), so I used this self-described “High Intensity Interval Training” (HIIT) as a warmup. It did take me about seven minutes, and according to my heart rate monitor I burned about 60 calories. If you extend that effort to an hour, it would be about equivalent to an Insanity workout… Or a long run. I did not compress an hour’s worth of workout time into seven minutes, but if you’re looking for a short workout that covers all the bases, this is definitely a good one.

For my second attempt, the following day (a planned rest day), I decided to do two circuits of this workout in a row. (Equivalent of a long run, twice… Never mind.) So in about 15 minutes, I burned about twice as many calories, and of course the second time through was more challenging, because I was keeping up a steady pace. So it’s possible to do something similar to an Insanity workout, in which an exercise circuit is repeated several times. In summary, I will say this does not live up to the hype, but it’s a good workout to keep handy for when time is limited.

A few days later, a friend forwarded a link to a Yahoo! Health article, 5-Minute Abs (Proven in a Lab!). I wasn’t crazy about the format of this “quick workout” because it uses the common online trick of one page per item, which is fine for browsing (and viewing more ads), not so good if you want to go from one exercise to the next. Anyway, here’s the intro:

“Meet the Doc Michele Olson, Ph.D. (aka our Dr. Abs), spent three months testing these exercises and comparing them

Rotating Ball Plank (very tricky move!)

with the crunch. For total toning, all are more effective—check out those percentages. You saw the moves here first, but her research will appear soon in ACSM’s Health & Fitness Journal.”

(How convenient to have a very photogenic scientist demonstrating these exercises!)

I gave this one a try one evening instead of my P90X Ab Ripper workout. If you’re unfamiliar, the Ab Ripper is a 15-minute workout, with a combination of exercises to target the abdominal muscles from various angles. So this should be a big time-saver too (five minutes instead of 15).

There are nine exercises, with 12 repetitions (or 12 per side, if applicable) recommended for each exercise. For a five-minute workout, you would need to complete each exercise in less than 35 seconds (on average). If you’re going for proper exercise form, that might be difficult. So I threw out the timetable, and learned each exercise, one page at a time. It took me about 15 minutes to get through them all, as it turns out. Some exercises require a floor mat, and others use the stability ball as shown. The picture I chose, of the Rotating Ball Plank, was the trickiest exercise of all. I can’t figure out from the picture and text description how to do it without falling off. Maybe with some practice?

Based on my experience, this might be an equivalent or even superior replacement for Ab Ripper, based on the claims for each exercise. “54% better than a crunch at activating your lats,” for example. (I think Ab Ripper is pretty good as far as that goes, because it’s not all simple crunches either.) However, I would like to see the “science” that proves the workout can be completed in five minutes by a person with average-to-superior fitness.

I would love to hear from you if you try these workouts too. Does the science make that much of a difference? Maybe it can save you some time and help you work out more effectively.