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One of the most common reasons for people skipping exercise is not having enough time in the day. We’re all busy with work and family commitments and it can be hard to find an hour to work out regularly. That’s where 7-Minute Workout Challenge comes in.
The iPhone-based app promises a straightforward, effective and ‘proper’ workout in just – you guessed it – seven minutes, packing 12 different exercises into a small time-slot every day, with trackable results and incentivised unlockable achievements. Could this be the app-based workout we’ve all been waiting for?
Up to the challenge
The app pushes you to complete a variety of exercises in a seven-minute blitz of intense, sweat-inducing movements with little to no rest. If you follow the workout to the letter and push yourself as hard as you can, the developers of the app claim that the programme is equivalent to an hour-long workout.
It’s a questionable notion but one they’ve backed with scientific research, stating that the app does indeed help to increase your metabolism and put you well on the way to losing that spare tyre. Over one million people (to date) have taken up the challenge: on the basis that there’s no smoke without fire, we gave it a go.
7 minute wonder
The app guides you through the exercises, tracking your results and offering you nudges of encouragement. The ability to unlock achievements is one of the key factors in keeping you coming back for more. Targets such as training four days in a row or completing a workout twice in one day help to keep you motivated, especially as the more you do the more achievements become available to unlock. Smashing each one can easily become quite addictive.
If you’re hoping this app will revolutionise your training, it won’t – it’s meant as an aid to improve your fitness rather than the key to a new body. There’s a catch, too, which is that to see the promised results you have to complete the challenge to the highest possible intensity. It’s literally all or nothing, and if you underperform in just a couple of workouts you could quickly find your motivation flagging.
An app for anyone
It’s easy to see why the 7-Minute Workout Challenge is so popular. If you’re fairly new to the fitness game it makes life nice and easy, giving both written and visual instructions on how to perform each exercise correctly. The usability is great, offering a straightforward, intuitive interface, and it’ll even remind you that you're due a workout just in case you ‘forget’. Our main gripe is the fact that it offers users an option to increase their rest times. While this might seem a positive for newcomers it kind of defeats the object of the challenge.
Conclusion
You don’t get in the Apple App Store top three for nothing. The 7-Minute Workout Challenge is a handy, motivational solution for anyone that doesn’t have the time to make it to the gym. The workout can be done pretty much anywhere, and its achievement-based nature ensures that you get out precisely what you put in.
At £1.49 it’s certainly one of the cheapest and most effective get-up-and-go workout tools that you could wish to use. Just don’t start applying the seven-minute rule to all aspects of your life – some things are worth taking time over.
