The 4-Second Workout!

Recent research has 4-hour workweeked the 7-minute workout and the NY Times is on it!

Four seconds of high-intensity exertion repeated periodically throughout the day might counteract some of the unhealthy metabolic consequences of sitting for hours, according to a surprising and timely new study of the potentially large benefits of diminutive workouts.

The study relied on a specialized type of stationary bicycle that few of us will have available at home, but its implications remain broadly applicable and suggest that even a few minutes - or seconds - of exercise each day could help substantially to bolster our health.

See also greasing the groove:

One way to grease the groove is to just do the exercise whenever you think of it. Ben Greenfield, in Beyond Training, describes how he would do three to five pull-ups every time he walked under a pull-up bar installed in his office doorway. By the end of the day, he’d have performed 30 to 50 pull-ups with minimal effort.

Using a standing desk (featured here in sit-down mode) has made getting short bursts of regular exercise much easier.

I work from home and sprinkle exercise throughout my day. Working at a standing desk makes it easy to walk away from the screen, do a few pull-ups, plank for a minute, do some jumping jacks, and then get right back into whatever I was doing.

I stopped in the middle of writing this post to do some bodyweight exercises on my pull-up bar for about a minute and now I’m back at it — it didn’t even feel like an interruption because I never really lost my train of thought. Now, where’s the 4-millisecond PhD? (via moss & fog)

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