Four minutes is the Tabata number — twenty seconds of maximum effort, ten seconds of rest, eight times over. Start the countdown here and go.
Four minutes is short enough to be genuinely brutal in a workout context — the entire Tabata protocol, one of the most-studied high-intensity formats, fits inside it.
Four minutes is exactly eight Tabata intervals of 20 seconds work and 10 seconds rest. It is also a medium-boiled egg with a jammy centre, or about 520 spoken words — roughly the length of a short news bulletin.
Useful when a recipe, workout plan or exam paper states the time differently:
| 4 minutes in… | Value |
|---|---|
| Seconds | 240 |
| Minutes | 4 |
| Hours (decimal) | 0.0667 |
| Fraction of an hour | 1/15 of an hour |
| How many fit in an hour | 15 |
| How many fit in a day | 360 |
You do not need to press anything — the 4 minutes began the moment this page finished loading. At zero the alarm sounds, the digits flash red and the tab title changes to a bell icon. Stop Alarm silences it; Reset starts a fresh 4 minutes.
You can change the alarm sound at any point before or during the countdown — Beep, Digital, Alarm Bell, Chime, Siren and Soft Wake are all available, and each plays a short preview when selected. To use a different length, press Reset and type any duration, or pick one from the main timer page.
Need something else? Try a little shorter with the 3 minute timer or a little longer with the 5 minute timer. For a round comparison, exactly half this length is the 2 minute timer.
Eight rounds of 20 seconds all-out effort followed by 10 seconds rest comes to exactly 240 seconds. The format was developed from research on Olympic speed skaters and remains one of the most time-efficient conditioning protocols studied.
As a complete session, only if the intensity is genuinely maximal. Most people get better results using 4 minute blocks as one component inside a longer session — pair it with the 20 minute timer for the full workout.
Yes — the countdown begins as soon as the page loads, so there is nothing to press. If you would rather start it yourself, press Reset and then Start.
Yes. Pause holds the remaining time exactly where it is; Resume continues from that point and Reset returns the clock to the full 4 minutes.
VClock plays your selected alarm sound on a loop, flashes the display and changes the browser tab title. Press Stop Alarm to silence it.
Completely. There is no sign-up, no download, no daily limit and no watermark — set it as many times as you like.
Switch to the VClock alarm clock to ring at a specific hour instead of counting down.
Open the Alarm Clock