Each exercise is done continuously for 30 seconds, with a 10 second rest in-between. Intensity is the point: 8 out of a scale of 10.
In 2013 the New York Times published an article called The Scientific 7-Minute Workout. It emphasized high-intensity interval training over, say, long hours on a treadmill. While I remembered its existence, I never really gave it a shot. This week, more than four years later, some co-workers at Test Double were talking in our #health Slack channel about their routines. After months of physical therapy, I figured it was time to have a regular routine of my own again.
While I was doing physical therapy, I wrote a small program to talk me through the dozens of exercises and stretches I needed to do. It would announce the exercise, and count off the time or repetitions needed, moving from exercise to exercise automatically. It seemed like the right fit for the 7-Minute Workout, so this project was born.
I don't know about you, but I plan to go full-on Radio Taiso with this: every afternoon, I'll crank through the workout at a set time to break up my day and energize my evening.
You? Do whatever you want.
I intentionally put all the CSS and JavaScript in the same page, so take a look. The most interesting part is probably the speech, so I'll let you in on a secret: your browser has a text-to-speech engine in it.
The announcements use the Web Speech API (SpeechSynthesis & Co.) to control the speech synthesizers that come with modern operating systems for accessbility. To that end, if you want to change what voice is used, go to your Accessibility settings and change it there, reload this page, and the new voice should be used.