fitness from iM ON THE SET on Vimeo

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Exercise machines weren’t created to punish guys who eat too much. That’s what diets are for. But men spend hours, day after day, churning their arms and legs and waiting for the StairMaster or treadmill to make their bellies vanish. The result: They make it about as far as the average rat.

But your machine workout doesn’t have to be a road—or row—to nowhere. “By decreasing the duration and varying the intensity of your exercise sessions, you’ll get better results in less time,” says Chris Carmichael, founder of Carmichael Training Systems and coach to Lance Armstrong.

Try our guide to the five most popular exercise machines, with a high-intensity 20-minute workout geared for each. Your goals: Bust your exercise rut, and your gut, in record time.

Read more: http://www.menshealth.com/mhlists/exercise_machine_guide/index.php#ixzz0ZitYikPp

As in, “I figure I suffered between 15 and 20 concussions during my career,” says retired NFL middle linebacker Harry Carson, “half of them full-blown, the other half dings.”

As in, “I took about five or six major concussions,” says former NHL defenseman Jeff Beukeboom. “And another 10 or so dings.”

As in the story Pro Football Hall of Fame defensive tackle Artie Donovan once told me, back when I was ghostwriting his book, Fatso: “I break my leg one time when we’re short of defensive linemen. [Baltimore Colts head coach] Weeb Ewbank has the trainer tape it up real good and tight with a little splint and sends me back out there. I tell him, ‘Jeez, Weeb, I can’t even walk.’ He says, ‘Listen, Fatso, just crawl out there and fall down in front of somebody.’ So on the next play, that’s what I do, I fall down in front of the ball carrier. And about three people step on my head. I’m dinged up real good, almost blacking out. So they toss a bucket of ice water in my face and give me some smelling salts, then send me back in. Sure enough, I fall down again and a couple more guys land on my head. Now I can barely see. But I can’t tell Weeb. He wants me to play on a broken leg. What do you think he’d do if I begged out because of a couple of little dings?”

Roger Staubach laughs when I tell him this story. “It’s true,” says the former Dallas Cowboy and Hall of Fame quarterback, taking a break from running his Texas-based, multimillion-dollar real-estate consulting firm, the Staubach Company.

“I had a few concussions in college, a few in high school,” he says, “but back then they were, indeed, just dings. You shook them off, didn’t really worry about them.”

Now Staubach, 63, whose multiple concussions forced him into early retirement in 1979, counters with a story of his own: His first game as a Cowboy, September 1969. Green Bay Packers. Staubach is scrambling. The Packers’ monster middle linebacker, Ray Nitschke, lays him out cold.

“Instead of running out of bounds,” says Staubach, “I tried to cut back inside. Nitschke made me wish I hadn’t. I was knocked out. I couldn’t function. The next thing I knew, I was in the locker room. The typical ‘How many fingers do I have up?’ Then they gave me the smelling salts. It took me a while to get normal again.”

On the drive home that night, Staubach’s wife, a registered nurse, noticed with quiet alarm that his pupils were still dilated. Staubach told her, “If I die tonight, be sure to get hold of a good lawyer, because they sure didn’t check me out very well.”

Staubach laughs again. “Back then, you didn’t get a second opinion on a concussion. Nobody knew how serious they could be.”

This is truth told. But times change. Slowly.