SevenMinutePlus vs Plod

A seven-minute workout you can do in a hotel room, a spare bedroom, or the corner of an office. Twelve bodyweight exercises, thirty seconds each, with short rests - you need your body, a chair (or steps), and a wall. A spoken coach names each move before it starts, a quiet metronome keeps the seconds honest, and a countdown tells you when to change. You can put the phone down and never look at it. WHAT'S IN IT Three ready-made workouts: seven minutes, fourteen, or twenty-one, depending on how much you have An optional two-minute warm-up before any of them A workout builder: pick your exercises, work and rest lengths, and number of circuits, and add exercises of your own Twenty-eight hand-drawn exercise illustrations, so you can see the shape of a move at a glance A coach voice you choose, using the voices already on your device Mute the voice, the tones, or the metronome independently, whenever you like BUILT TO GET OUT OF YOUR WAY No account. No subscription. No advertising. No streaks, badges, or notifications nagging you back. It also never connects to the internet - not once. That means it works on a plane, in a basement, and in airplane mode, and it means nothing you do in it is collected, uploaded, or sold. There is nothing to opt out of. WHERE THE WORKOUT COMES FROM SevenMinutePlus builds on ideas presented in a 2013 paper by Brett Klika and Chris Jordan in ACSM's Health & Fitness Journal, which set out a twelve-station circuit of bodyweight exercises - thirty seconds of work per station, with short transitions, repeatable two or three times. SevenMinutePlus is an independent app. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the authors, the journal, or the American College of Sports Medicine. BEFORE YOU START This app is not medical advice. Talk to your physician before beginning any exercise program. Work at your own level, and stop if you feel pain, dizziness, or shortness of breath. The paper's authors advise caution for anyone who is detrained, previously injured, or elderly, and note that the isometric holds - wall sit, plank, and side plank - are not recommended for people with hypertension or heart disease. Dynamic exercises can be substituted.

Plod is a running app that stays out of the way. No account. No login. No subscription. No feed, no followers, no streak guilt. You open it, you run, it tells you how it went. RUN WITH A VOICE IN YOUR EAR Plod speaks at the start and finish, at every completed kilometre, and when your pace drifts away from what the session asked for. Every number it says — your split, your elapsed time, your pace — is worked out on your phone or watch. It is correct, and it works with no signal and no account. Speech ducks your music instead of stopping it, and keeps going with the screen locked. SESSIONS THAT FIT YOUR PACES Tell Plod what you're training for and what you can run it in today. It works out your easy, long, tempo, interval and recovery paces from there, then builds named sessions around them — controlled pick-ups, steady tempo blocks, run/walk, long easy finishes. The coach walks you through each block, counts you into the end of one, and tells you when you're pushing an easy day too hard. APPLE WATCH THAT DOESN'T NEED YOUR PHONE Start a run on the watch and leave the phone at home. Route, distance, pace, heart rate and calories are recorded on your wrist, and the same voice coach speaks through it — including full interval and tempo sessions. Runs save to the watch first and transfer to your iPhone whenever the two are next near each other. Nothing is lost if you run out of range. THE DETAIL AFTERWARDS Kilometre splits with a relative-speed bar, elevation per split, your route on a map, moving time, cadence, steps, and average and maximum heart rate. Each figure appears only when it genuinely exists — Plod leaves a number out rather than inventing one. Runs save to Apple Health when you allow it, and export as JSON whenever you want them elsewhere. OPTIONAL: BRING YOUR OWN AI If you have an OpenAI API key, Plod can add one short line of encouragement to what the coach already says, and answer training questions in plain language. The key is yours, stored in your device Keychain, and never leaves it except to talk to OpenAI. Everything above works fully without it. Plod gives general fitness guidance, not medical advice. It is not a substitute for a doctor or a qualified coach. Stop and seek medical care if you feel unwell.