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Unlocking the Secret of Musical Beats Per Minute to Master Your Exercise Routine

As most people know, music can be an extremely powerful motivator, especially when it comes to exercise. In part this is because over the course of our lives we come to associate certain songs with specific emotional responses, for example 'Eye of the Tiger' conjures up ideas of overcoming the odds and stretching yourself to your limits, not only because of the lyrics but because of the way people associate it with the iconic training montage from the Rocky movies.

Whilst mental and emotional stimulation is an incredibly powerful tool to harness during a workout sessions, music should do more than just get you aimlessly pumped up. After all exercise is all about pacing yourself and making sure to consistently follow through with your routine in a controlled way.

Believe it or not, the amounts of BPM in any given music selection can have a large impact on the kind of rhythm a person tries to establish during their workout, which is why it's a good idea to use different types of music for different types of routines. For example, during a 5k run, you would probably want to listen to a play-list containing a lot of songs with a high number of beats per minute, to keep you energized and moving at full speed the entire time. Whereas if you intend to run a marathon over the course of several hours, you would be better off with a long play-list of low beat per minute music, to help better pace yourself over such a significant distance.

To get an idea of what kind of beats per minute you should be using for any given exercise, check out this free BeatScanner Windows application for doing just that.

If the idea of working out how many BPM your songs have sounds a bit daunting to you, don't worry, because sites such as Running Playlist have already done most of the hard work for you. Listing hundreds of songs along with a count of how many beats per minute are present in the music, as well as offering suggestions on what kind of exercises the music is best used for.

Of course given the wide range of musical tastes out there, it's unlikely that music orientated exercise sites are going to be able to cover them all. So if you want to work out how many BPM's your favorite songs have, you can always try using a BPM analyzer like MixMeister.  Sound analyzing software of this type isn't always a hundred percent accurate, as certain instruments and styles of music can confuse the program, but for the most part it does a pretty good job.

The only way to know for sure how many BPM any particular music track has, is to manually check the song yourself using a BPM tapper. Unfortunately, this takes a huge amount of time, especially when first learning how to do it. That said it can make for a fun activity on a rainy day, providing the perfect excuse to go exploring through your music collection to find songs for your workout routine that may have completely slipped your mind before.

About the Author

This is a guest post by Jessy Troy who blogs at Define Fitness.org and Fitness Body

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The above guest post is published based on the premise that it will be helpful and informative. The opinions made within it are those of the author and not of sunnyray.org. The links you may find within this post do not necessarily imply our recommendation or endorsement of the views expressed within them.

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