The Scientific 7-Minute Workout

Are you still doing it? No offense but it doesn't seem to have had a tremendous effect besides making you feel better, which in and of itself may be totally worth it for 7 minutes of work anyway. Regardless, the only reason I say this is because I don't think that this is a good program, and I think the science around it is short sighted and not very well carried out.

The major problem is that the studies are not nearly long enough. The human body can adapt really well, and these exercises don't really provide any meaningful level of progression (besides just doing them more). As a user of this program continues, they will have to keep adding cycles, and eventually they'll just be doing it an hour every morning.

As a way to trick yourself into the habit of exercise I think that's great. But the concept that 7 minutes a day can really make you healthy is kind of absurd. There is no question it's better than nothing (especially for people who are already significantly overweight), but it's too bad it's not being sold as an intro to exercise program, rather than The Only Thing You Ever Have to Do Ever.

> As a way to trick yourself into the habit of exercise [...]

I heard something about this, only in the past few months, but I can't remember where. Apparently, the way to create habits is to trick yourself by doing something almost ridiculous or trivial. For example, say you want to start flossing regularly. For a lot of people, this is a tough thing to make a habit of. The suggestion is to just floss one tooth, once a day. Don't even try to floss two teeth the next day. Just keep flossing one tooth every day and try not to think about starting a flossing habit.

And then, one day, so the suggestion goes, you'll just go ahead and spontaneously floss all of your teeth and continue to do so in the days after that. You've tricked yourself into the habit, because you had no conscious resistance to committing to flossing one tooth; and in the meantime, by flossing that one tooth, your subconscious built the habit. Once the habit was firmly in place, your conscious brain no longer had any resistance to put up.

Something along those lines is supposed to work for exercise, and many other things as well.

The original study said the 7 minute routine should be repeated 2 to 3 times. It also listed a sample regimen which most people took too literally. You're supposed to vary the exercises and there are dozens of options. Johnson and Johnson have a really good app with lots of options.