An article I read in the last year’s May-June issue of the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health & Fitness Journal does just that. In 12 exercises using only your own body weight, a chair and a wall, it fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort, which essentially combines a long run and a visit to the weight room into about seven minutes of steady discomfort — all of it based on science. This time of year, being the coldest, there’s no better place to get your daily exercise done then in the comfort of your own home. Since this new research came out, I’ve been implementing it into my daily routine with fantastic results!

“There’s very good evidence” that high-intensity interval training provides “many of the fitness benefits of prolonged endurance training but in much less time,” says Chris Jordan, the director of exercise physiology at the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, Fla., and co-author of the article.

Work by scientists at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and other institutions shows, for instance, that even a few minutes of training at an intensity approaching your maximum capacity produces molecular changes within muscles comparable to those of several hours of running or bike riding.

Interval training, though, requires intervals; the extremely intense activity must be intermingled with brief periods of recovery. In the program outlined by Mr. Jordan and his colleagues, this recovery is provided in part by a 10-second rest between exercises. But even more, he says, it’s accomplished by alternating an exercise that emphasizes the large muscles in the upper body with those in the lower body. During the intermezzo, the unexercised muscles have a moment to, metaphorically, catch their breath, which makes the order of the exercises important.

The exercises should be performed in rapid succession, allowing 30 seconds for each, while, throughout, the intensity hovers at about an 8 on a discomfort scale of 1 to 10, Mr. Jordan says. Those seven minutes should be, in a word, unpleasant. The upside is, after seven minutes, you’re done.

For those of you who wish to take it to the next level after a week or two, I suggest doubling the routine by repeating it and thus completing a 14-minute workout.

Below is the illustration of the recommended exercises, with simple instructions on how to implement them. If you want to simplify the implementation, There’s even a cool website/APP that combines an online timer together with a graphic describing each exercise that you can find here. I highly recommend it.

 Perform these exercises for 30 seconds each, while giving yourself exactly 10 seconds to rest between each exercise. When you’re done, see if you can do it again