Do you work out?
I try really hard to enjoy being a gym rat. But I go in spurts – a year on of consistent exercising and about a year off. I’m in my year off phase right now and last night, after I nearly suffered respiratory failure playing Wii’s Just Dance for the first time, it became obvious that I need to start my year ON. Soon.
One thing I cannot do at the gym is exercise without music. If my iPod dies in the middle of a workout, so do I. Somehow, watching the Food Network or Ellen while trying to sweat out toxins just doesn’t cut it for me.
I have more than 2000 songs on my iPod, yet I’ve never spent the time to organize a good workout playlist. I have playlists with lots of good workout songs, but just when I get into the groove with a great beat to keep me going on the elliptical, Lionel Richie or Enya comes on and I slow down like a heavy locomotive.
Not good.
When I used to take a spinning class, the instructor would say things like, “Okay, this next song is moving it up to 160 bpm.”
Like that mattered to me? I was a sweaty, shaky shadow of my former self. I just wanted water. I didn’t care how many bpms a song was!
Apparently, someone out there knew what I did not. And he created a website all about it. This site actually helps you construct workout playlists very easily AND lets you do it based on bpm.
Which, I’ve learned, is essential if you want to stop having Enya slow down your workouts.
The site is called Run Hundred.
The guy who maintains the site is a music writer – he pens for Marie Claire and Real Age.
He finds songs that he thinks are good to work out to. He sorts them by genre. He sorts them by bpm. He sorts by decade (oddly, the 70s are missing. I guess Steve Miller Band didn’t make good workout music?).
He posts a clip of the song for you to listen to and vote on whether YOU think it’s good to workout to.
And then, presumably, you find a bunch of songs there to build your customized workout playlist.
I had a lot of fun playing around on the site. I found several new tunes that I’ll add to my playlist. Any day now. When I get off my butt and decide it’s the year ON of working out again.
I’ve learned now that 75 bpm is really slow, so if I have a lot of resistance on the machine, I should put a 75 bpm song on to grind through the hard stuff. And when I just want to do some peppy fast cardio, kick it up past 150 bpm.
RunHundred is a very simple site that is extremely useful. Go check it out!
