Shake Your Booty

If you haven’t exercised all your life, it can be a hard habit to pick up. Let’s face it, if you actually liked it, you’d already have been doing it, right? Maybe.

Sometimes it just takes finding the right activity to get you started. Sometimes it’s just making yourself do it.

For myself, I find that once I’m actually exercising, I’m fine. I love the way I feel afterwards. But I can really psych myself out, if I’m not careful. You’ve heard the excuses: I don’t have time, I’m tired, it’s boring, etc. I think I may have mentioned before that I’m really great at rationalizing anything I want to do.

How do I get past this? The easiest way is to get up and exercise first thing in the morning. If I don’t have time to think about it, I’m already halfway done before I realize it. Another thing that helps me is music.

Research shows that listening to upbeat music while you exercise helps you work out longer and harder, leading to faster calorie burn. Sounds great, right?

I recently came across a website that groups songs that might be good workout music by genre, decade and beats per minute (BPM). Genre and decade are self-explanatory, but BPM? Yes, you can use music that have a lower BPM to warm-up or cool-down and faster BPM music for your workout. The website is called RunHundred.

In addition to this website, there is an app for your iPod/iPhone called Cadence that will go through the music in your library and find the BPM for those songs.

Have you heard of either of these? How do you find your workout music? What do you like to listen to?