How are you staying in shape over the summer? One thing I definitely miss about living on campus is a gym within walking distance with no monthly membership fees! Fortunately, with your two feet, some tennis shoes and an .mp3 player (cool tips here if you have a smartphone as well) you can stay in shape on the cheap and get the most out of your workout time without fancy gym equipment.
A New York Times article reported that songs with a BPM between 120 & 140 were the
best motivators, enabling runners to fight through fatigue. The numbers 120 -140 “roughly corresponds to the average person’s heart rate during a routine workout,” according to the article.
It’s really easy to detect the BPM of your music–the best application for this I could find as far as accuracy and ease of use was from www.mixmeister.com. Download their BPM Analyzer and from there the interface is extremely easy to use. Just go to “File” “Open” and locate the music file you want to analyze. It will keep a playlist (you’ll need to go into iTunes or Windows Media Player to actually play the file) for you that allows you to see the songs you’ve analyzed and the BPM count.
If you have a smartphone, there’s an awesome app for interval runs called RecordBeater that automatically detects the cadence of your steps as you hit the working and resting phases of your intervals and plays songs at corresponding BPM rates. How cool is that?
We’ve already done the work for you if you want to do neither of those things, we’ve analyzed some songs that fall into the BPM sweet spot.
Summer Running Music Playlist
Miike Snow – Silvia (Felix Da Housecat Remix)
Chemical Brothers – It Began in Africa
Aphrodite – Blue Mystique
Christopher Lawrence – Renegade
Far East Movement – 2gether
Kanye West feat. Lykki Li, Santigold – Gifted
George Acosta – Tubular Bells
Avicii & Sebastian Drums – My Feelings for You
Sponge – Wax Ecstatic
Prodigy – Climbatize
Pendulum – Blood Sugar
Feed Me – Blood Red
Prodigy – Warriors Dance (Slof Man dubstep remix)
Sander van Dam ft. Carol van Lee – Love is Darkness
Wonderbread
I’m reading Legal Environment of Business