4 Minute Timer

Two hundred and forty seconds

Four minutes is 240 seconds. Fifteen runs of it fill an hour exactly, and three runs fill a fifth of one, which makes it one of the easier lengths to stack without doing sums in your head.

Why four minutes exists as a length

• The interval block people call Tabata is eight rounds of twenty seconds on and ten seconds off. That is 30 seconds a round, and 30 times 8 is 240 – four minutes to the second.
• The four-minute mile, the benchmark ever since Roger Bannister went under it in 1954. Four minutes is what that pace sounds like when you sit through it.
• A long pop song, or two short ones.
• One boxing cycle: a three-minute round plus the minute between rounds.

Stacking it

Four minutes on, one minute off, repeated twelve times, comes to an hour. Four minutes run three times is twelve minutes, which the 12 minute timer does in one go.

Near neighbours

One step down is the 3 minute timer, one step up the 5 minute timer. If you want to time the intervals inside the block instead of the block itself, use the 20 second timer and the 10 second timer, or the stopwatch for one continuous run. Everything else is on the timer page.

Accuracy

The clock runs against your system clock, not against a counter that a sleeping tab can stall, so a backgrounded tab still lands on zero at the right moment. The sound is the weak part: a phone that puts itself to sleep may never play it. Do not lean on this for anything where missing the alarm matters – medication, an exam, a step in cooking that burns.