My arms grow tired as I notice the stopwatch on my phone is approaching 30 seconds. Once the time is up, I have only five seconds to stand up from my plank and reset the stopwatch. Now I have to do as many high knees as I can while running in place for another 30 seconds. Thankfully, I have less than three minutes left in my workout, and I haven’t even been exercising for five minutes.

The Scientific 7-Minute Workout is an accelerated workout that, when done at maximum effort, can reap the same results as a full-length workout. If someone doesn’t have time to do a full cardio workout, this can be done instead. I decided to do this workout every day for a week in order to see how effective it is compared to regular workouts.

The workout is comprised of 12 exercises, including different types of pushups and planks, along with crunches, lunges, step-ups, and wall-sits. You do these exercises for 30 seconds each, with five second breaks in between.

The first day I tried the workout, I didn’t feel like I got enough exercise. I went over the exercises and their order before I started the workout, but since there are 12 exercises, I still got confused about what I was supposed to do. I spent the five second breaks looking at my phone for which exercise to do next instead of recovering.

In order for this workout to be as effective as possible in only seven minutes, I had to take all of the exercises seriously. When you’re doing a bunch of jumping jacks for 30 seconds, it can be easy to slack off and get lazy. In order to make this workout worth it, I had to do all of the exercises at maximum effort.

By the end of the week, I was able to complete the workout efficiently, but it started becoming pretty tedious and repetitive. Although there are 12 different exercises, completing each of them in the same order every day became tiring.

I also found that although the workout is only seven minutes, I would still dread doing it and procrastinate like I would for a longer workout. The workout may be short, but it’s really intense.

If you’re short on time, the Scientific 7-Minute Workout is a quick and effective replacement for a full workout. However, it’s most effective as a short-term solution. I don’t suggest replacing your regular workouts with this for a week like I did.

Christina Giovanazi is a Sports Editor for The Patriot and jcpatriot.com.