Seven is the magic number that is currently rolling off the lips of fitness enthusiasts.
Take a look at the amount of seven-minutes-a-day home workouts and seven-day challenges that are flooding the Internet and trending on YouTube.
They make all kinds of claims, but is that duration really sufficient enough to make you lose fat and drop inches off your body parts?
Or is it a scam?
The whole seven-minute rage started in 2013 when the original high intensity interval training (HIIT) workout was published in the American College of Sport Medicine’s (ACSM)
Health and Fitness Journal.
The intention was to get people to move and maximise their health benefits in the shortest amount of time, i.e. alternating between 30-second bursts of maxed-out exercise (making you breathe hard) and brief, 10-second periods of rest.
Men take pride in having them big, but women want them slender.
It’s a skeletal muscle group that’s difficult to bulk or trim, even though it’s one of the most used in daily tasks.
If you’re unsure which muscles these are, I’m referring to the calves.
Genetics and anatomical structure play a significant role in how the muscle is shaped and how large it can grow.
The calves comprise of two main muscles: the outer gastrocnemius (known as the calf belly with two “heads”, i.e. medial head and lateral head), and the underlying soleus, which is the smaller of the two.