Ultra-Brief Workouts: The Agony and The Satisfaction

To say I have a love-hate relationship with exercise would be too strong. But I’ve never truly enjoyed it, and for the relatively small fraction of my life when I’ve done it regularly, it has been at best a chore.

One of those times was in medical school. For a quarter or two, I went to the pool regularly. After a vacation, I returned to the pool and ran into my friend Brad. When I asked how his vacation was, he said, “Great!” and proceeded to tell me about biking a century or maybe two, hiking, running. I realized that there two kinds of people in the world: the ones who exercise more when they’re on vacation, and the ones who exercise less. Both kinds were represented in that conversation, and you can see which I was.

I seem to have an abiding interest in getting something for, well, if not nothing, then “as little as possible” (hence: short-term therapy, no-knead bread, and no doubt a number of other hyphen-bearing shortcuts). So when I started to hear about 20-minute workouts using high-intensity interval training, I got interested. [Spoiler alert: 20 minutes is way too long.]

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