How to make your workouts fun

I think working-out in a gym is more boring than waiting at the DMV.  That is until I discovered the secret.  Now I just can't get enough.  

I have been running for over 30 years.  However during a recent visit to the doctor for an ankle injury, the doctor happened to run his hand-held x-ray thingy over my hip joints.  He made a smelly face and asked me how much I run.  When I told him, his only comment was "You're not from Kenya you know."  That came as a big surprise but his dumbass comment was a shot at the fact that I am a big guy (>220 lbs) and I probably shouldn't be running 5 days a week.  He suggested I started using an eliptical trainer or the stationary bike.  Running for me is convenient to do, the equipment is minimal, the price is right, the air is fresh and nobody is staring at you as huff and puff.  But he went to college for almost a decade so I decided to give it a try.

I found a great gym (Equinox Fitness) that was busy but not over-crowded, well-equipped, and clean.  They also have 16 televisions playing and each piece of equipment has an audio jack.  Equipped with my earphones, I mounted the elliptical trainer.  I quickly discovered that watching the Food Channel gets you hungry, the various news channels are just annoying, and watching MTV, VH1, or the E channel was destroying my faith in humanity.  As a result, my eyes started to wander.  Maybe it was the way I was doing it but somehow the women in front of me could tell when I was staring at their butts.  Clearly that was not a winning long-term strategy.

So I'm sure some of you already know what the real answer is here but I guess I'm slow.  I was given an iPod a while back.  I'm sure I'm the last person in North America to buy one but it was a religious issue for me.  I didn't want to join the church of Apple and pay the heavy tithing they require.  But since it was a gift, I thought I would make the best of it.  So here it is, the secret to enjoying your work-outs... listen to music.

You can't just load up your iPod, turn on shuffle, hit play, and pump to the beat.  What I discovered when I did that was that I was exercising at a tempo that often did not match the music.  However when a song played that exactly matched my pace, it was fantastic.  So all I had to do was figure out the tempo of each song and then build playlists at various tempos.  But how do I get the bpm (beats per minute) of each of my songs?

Turns out lots of people already figured this out.  I googled and found beaTunes .  It is a fairly cool program that does several useful things but the most relevant for me is that it will go through your entire library and analyze each song and place the determined bpm in the bpm column in iTunes.

So here is what I did:

• Download beaTunes.  It is free for 1 week but $20 to purchase.
• Analyze iTunes library.  This took hours in my case of 2000 songs.  Your mileage may vary.
• Create separate playlists named 80bpm, 100bpm, 120bpm, and 140bpm
• Make sure BPM column is displayed in Itunes.  If the bpm column is not displayed on iTunes, go to the View menu, select View Options, and check Beats per Minute.
• Click on the BPM column header and your library will be sorted by bpm.
• Scroll down to 80bpm and start dragging songs into the 80bpm playlist.  Listen to songs as slow as 76 and as high as 84.  Stop when the playlist is at least several hours in length.
• Repeat for each playlist.  

Now it's time to go to the gym.  The key to making this experience really fun is two-fold:

• Put great music on each playlist
• Match the bpm of the playlist to the exercise you are doing.

Of course everyone's musical tastes vary so what excites one person may sound like noise to another.  I personally go for classic rock where you can hear plenty of drums.  Credence, Cream, Springsteen, and Talking Heads are especially good.  If you have any classical music, it has the appropriate bpm but is just not as exciting to me as "Run Through the Jungle."  To each, his own.

Next you need to try each playlist with each form of exercise you do.  Here is what I have found:

• 80bpm - perfect for the bike.  A good cycling cadence should be anywhere from 60-100 rpm.  80 rpm = 80bpm if you do one revolution per beat.
• 100bpm - perfect for the end of the bike ride where you want to really crank.  "Burning Down the House" is superb for this.
• 120bpm - this is ideal my pace on the elliptical trainer.  Work out to about 10 minute miles.
  
• 140bpm - With the same foot each beat, this is a killer pace on the elliptical.  Alternating feet each beat is equivalent to 70bpm and is great for cycling.

One final word of caution.  Remember that even though the music is blasting in your ears, nobody else can hear it.  So when you start singing along out loud, people will hear you.  I don't know how to explain this but no matter what you do, it always sounds like a cat howling.

But who cares what somebody else thinks of your voice?  At least you will be having a great time enjoying your music and maintaining your health.

Rock on!