With the winter sports season coming up, cheerleaders and basketball players are frantically trying to get fit and lose weight before the tryouts to make it on the varsity team. Due to the burden of schoolwork and extracurricular activities, however, students can have trouble allocating a portion of their time to solely going to the gym and working out for several hours. Targeting students and people living modern lives with limited time and resources, the health app Seven, available on both iTunes and Google Play, provides a list of suggestions for workouts that can be done in under seven minutes.
The creators of this app, released this year on Sept. 30 , claim that if done intensely and accurately, the effect of the workout can far surpass the effects shown if the workout were to be done for a longer time, for instance, one hour. Even though this could be true for a select number of people, the methods and workouts that Seven provides seem to stray too much from the orthodox exercises to benefit a majority of the student population.
On the one hand, Seven has rather advanced design features and is beneficial for keeping track of dates and amounts of calorie consumption. For instance, Seven has a calendar feature so that users can mark what workouts they did on which particular days. An alarm feature and a timer also accompany the calendar. While the alarm prevents users from forgetting about dedicating a certain amount of time to exercising, the timer is enabled during the workout so users know when the seven minutes are up. Though the many features prove to be useful, the essence of working out for seven minutes as the app presents is essentially wrong.
However, according to critics from the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health & Fitness Journal, the effectiveness of the workout is directly related to the amount of time that one spends. Therefore, even though the short, intense workouts can result in better metabolism and a longer life, the impact of the seven minutes is largely overestimated. In addition, according to the Huffington Post, users report that the workouts actually take much longer than seven minutes. The amount of time it takes is largely dependent on the pace in which users go through the exercises, but a majority of the users claim that the exercises took around 20 minutes, which is much longer than the time that the workouts are supposed to take.
The workouts definitely result in sweat and an increased heart rate because they consist of vigorous workouts such as pushups and movements that tax the muscles. However, since they require much physical activity and exertion in a short amount of time, the experience throughout the seven minutes can be unpleasant. Thus, this fast-paced, intense workout does not work the best for all people. Although Seven is reliable for keeping track of different lifestyle routines, the guarantee that seven minutes will suffice as adequate exercise is not met. Students who want to lose weight or become more fit should not solely rely on Seven for workouts.
Photo Source: Baby Dicas