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Aug

Organize Your Fitness: How To Create A Super-Simple Interval Training Playlist

(2) Comments Fun & Recreation | Health & Fitness | Technology & Social Media

image Do you keep a constant pace when you exercise? Or do you prefer to intersperse power bursts with recovery phases?

Whether you like to walk, run, jog, or row, you can introduce a simple version of interval training to your exercise routine.

You don’t need to bother with complicated timings and stopwatches for this basic version. Simply follow the steps to create a playlist that does the work for you, so you can do as Jim Steinman says and

let the drummer tell your heart [rate] what to do.

Organize Your Fitness: How To Create A Super-Simple Interval Training Playlist

Step 1: Decide how long your workout session will be

If you’re a newbie, you might like to begin with 20 minutes. For veterans, 60 minutes might suit.

Choose a duration that feels challenging but doable.

Step 2: Start a new playlist

Open iTunes or your music library and create a new playlist. Name it Interval 1 if you have no better naming protocol.

Step 3: Choose your tunes

  • First, choose an easy-paced tune to warm you up.
  • Next, decide on a slow, relaxing track for your cool-down phase.
  • Last, divide the remaining session time between fast-paced, high-energy tracks, and medium-paced tunes that let you take it down a notch. Alternate these tracks on your playlist. Ideally, start and end this working time with high-energy tracks.

To keep track of your playlist length, click the playlist name and the total time – along with number of songs and file size – will display in the grey bar at the bottom. You may need to play around with different tracks to get the session duration you want.

Simple! And you’re wired for interval training sound.

Got some suggestions for motivating workout tracks? Please share them!

To leave a comment: Scroll to the bottom of this post – a comment box is waiting for you.

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Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/renneville/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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Comments

Katelijne August 16, 2009

You can regulate the length of each song (e.g. if a track starts slow, and you only want to use the fast part – or if you only want to use the first 90 seconds/ or the middle 60 sec. etc. )

Instructions:

Step one:

choose a certain song, go to “file”, choose “get info”, choose “options” in that screen, and it will show the start time as “0:00″ and the end time as the exact length of that particular song.

Step two:

When/if you put a check mark in front of “start time” you can regulate/choose the exact second when you want this song to start and the same is valid for the end time… this way you can have exact lengths on your interval training and you do not have to play as much around to get songs to fit your training session.

I found a C25K plan on the internet, chose slow and fast paced songs alternately and then adjusted the length to fit week one. The following weeks, I only had to adjust the length of each song, shortening the slow ones and adding time to the fast paced ones, eventually having to add songs in between. Worked great -

One warning though, these songs remain this length in your regular library, so you have to make copies first of the songs I guess, and choose skip when shuffling ( I am not really sure how to tackle that problem)

I hope this is understandable and helps someone out there – my son taught me this when I was struggling to do just what Michele wrote: trying to get songs to fit my training session!

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