You’re in the gym working out to some lively music (I like Franz Ferdinand or Linkin Park) when it comes time to put up that impossible last rep. As you sweat and struggle and call on every last ounce of strength in your body, the music swells and consumes you, seemingly reflecting your inner turmoil. Up, up, up—just a little bit more—and now the weight is almost there, and the music has reached a crescendo, and it looks like you just…might……
Then Fur Elise comes on.
Only half of that last rep is strength. The other half is psychological, and music can provide a much needed psychological boost—when the right notes are playing. When they’re not, nothing brings you down faster.
The problem isn’t limited to the iPod Shuffle. The same jarring shifts in tempo also occur within a single song as it alternates between the chorus (which is typically rousing) and the instrumental accompaniment (which is more mellow).
We need an iPod that can monitor your body’s exertion level and flip on Eye of the Tiger when you need it most. This will go well with the gym of the future I asked for.
February 21st, 2005 at 3:59 am
Hah, that would be something. Nevertheless I wouldn’t be surprised if this will be true in a not-so-distant future.
On the other hand, doesn’t the iPod have playlists? Creating a gym-playlist would at least minimize the problem.
February 21st, 2005 at 5:18 am
your ‘gym of the future’ watch can send a wireless signal to your ipod detailing your heart rate and choose a song accordingly.
February 21st, 2005 at 9:55 am
i’d settle for autodetection of beats per minute, and an autoload based on that info. wouldn’t be perfect, but at least it’d be automated and inject some variety.
February 21st, 2005 at 10:10 am
Don’t the Nike mp3 players have a pedometer or heart rate monitor thing in them? Now, if only they used data to change the song.
February 21st, 2005 at 3:19 pm
[…] journal entry posted by jayoung on February 21, 2005 10:19am From Blake Ross: We need an iPod that can monitor your body?s exertion level and flip on Eye of the Tiger when you need it most.
February 21st, 2005 at 3:31 pm
As if you ever really work out! ;)
February 22nd, 2005 at 5:46 am
The closest form of this ‘today’ I can think of (with an iPod) would be to run a music analysis tool over your music collection to fill in the Beats-Per-Minute ID3 field. Once you have BPM specified for every song in your library you can make a smart playlist to only include songs of a specified BPM range. You could even then order by BPM to cope with your work rate increasingly during the gym session.
Then sync that to your iPod and away :)
I’ve got no idea about where to find BPM tools, mind. Probably Google.
February 22nd, 2005 at 3:39 pm
geeks at the gym? doing reps? uber geeks that are responsible for open source works? The world really is coming to an end.
April 16th, 2005 at 9:57 pm
wsop
The thing-in-itself, the will-to-live, exists whole and undivided in every being, even in the tiniest; it is present as completely as in all that ever were, are, and will be, taken together. by