seven minutes in purgatory

[jazzfish]

I was sick right after Xmas and then I moved up here, where instead of biking to yoga and then to work I'm mostly sitting in my apartment. This is decidedly Bad News for my physical state. I currently weigh in at, um, about 5% over my previous maximum, which came in spring 2002 right before I got fired from a job where I was sitting around all day drinking Cokes and being depressed. (Long, long story.) Weight is just a convenient metric, though. More worryingly, I get out of breath climbing a flight of stairs. My lungs have always been crap but not usually /this/ much crap.

I was thinking about getting an exercise machine (probably a bike) and doing that in the mornings, maybe while watching an episode of my very large backlog of acquired TV shows. Problems there include cost of machine, time and effort in acquiring machine (might be able to find one in Vanderhoof an hour out; more likely I'd need to go to Prince George two hours out), and willingness to eat an hour out of my morning.

Then a few days ago I remembered something Jmac had posted awhile ago, about a seven-minute workout and how it (among other things) had improved his quality of life immensely. The basic idea is a highly compressed form of interval training: work a set of muscles for thirty seconds, rest for ten seconds, work a different set of muscles for thirty seconds, repeat. The app I'm using gives twelve different exercises.

Seven minutes (even accounting for his "Like all project estimates that cross my desk, I wish to double its budget, and then add a little extra time for slop") is doable much of the time. Perhaps more importantly, it's doable while I'm traveling.

I started yesterday. I collapsed halfway through "Plank". Today I made it through the whole sequence, more or less, despite severe stiffness in my pecs making it hard to keep raising my arms above my head during jumping jacks.

Here's hoping it does some good.

Comments

[lurkingcat]

Back when I had a 90-minute-and-two-buses commute into work I used to get in, shut myself in the server room and do a seven minute workout because it was the only regular exercise I was going to manage to fit into a working day. I never did get the hang of the plank section but I like to think that it kept my fitness levels from atrophying any further than they already had at the time. When the office moved to a site forty five minutes walk away from me I found that I could actually do the walk straight off without keeling over at the end. Or even at the end of the week. Which was a small and unexpected triumph.

[jazzfish]

Nice! And good to hear it's got some chance of doing some good. :)

[aamcnamara]

Someone else recently recommended the seven-minute workout thing to me! I've been doing something my sister refers to as my "morning calisthenics" but have been looking to step things up a small notch--now that this has come up twice, maybe I'll give it a try. I hope it does what you want it to!

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Any exercise is good for the bod. If you're sore, you know it's good!

[jazzfish]

Heh. True enough. S'a question of whether it's /enough/ exercise, to which I guess the answer is "we'll see."