Besides the obvious. (Shut up.)
Here's my question. I made a workout playlist for my iPod today (17 songs, exactly an hour in length) but I'm having a little problem with the ordering. Do you all think that it should start mellower and gradually get faster, or should it start mellower and gradually get more aggressive? I'm ignoring the common wisdom that there should be a cooldown portion, because the last two minutes when my body is telling me, "Andrea, you and I cannot *do* two more minutes of cardio or we will die,"*** can only be overcome by "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate", by Mission of Burma, 2:05 of fast and aggressive perfection, so that has to be the final song on the playlist. That is not a question. If I'm going to cool down rather than just collapse in a sweaty panting heap, the friggin iPod can just cycle back to the beginning, 'k? The whole ordering thing is further confounded by my aesthetic sensibilities that all the hiphop/rap, all the 80's power pop, all the punk, etc, cannot be grouped together, it must be mixed up. Which fucks up ordering either by speed or aggressiveness, I'll have you know.
Gah. If anyone has done this successfully (by which I mean, "in a way that made you happy with your final result") or just has an opinion, could you shoot me some advice?
I leave you with this:
I'm a menace, a dentist, an oral hygienist
Open your mouth for about four or five minutes
Take a little bit of this fluoride rinse
Swish but don't spit it, swallow and I'll finish
Four or five minutes? Ah, boys in their twenties. I remember those days. Heh.
xoxo
***Oh, don't tell me that your body doesn't have third person conversations with you.
7 comments:
I have never been disappointed by letting the little darling shuffle its way through a couple hundred songs that I like, and trusting to luck on which occupy the first hour. (Worst case, just fast forward through any offending non sequiturs and enjoy the next one that comes up). I understand the importance of Mission of Burma at the appropriate time, but the same songs in the same sequence can only take you so far if you're hoping to do this exercise thing more than 2 days in a row.
(To the original question, though, I'd vote aggressive).
The problem with my iPod, shuffle, and working out is that there's a whole *crapload* of massage music loaded on there, hahaha. Nothing to throw one off one's game than the sudden appearance of the Tibetan singing bowls.
I know, "just fast forward", but I want to have the playlist fall back for times when I don't want to fumble with taking it out of my pocket, etc. You're right though, I should probably have a few different hours of songs ready to stave off tedium. (Not that I get bored easily with musical repetition--I've spent summers listening to basically one album, and days listening to one song on replay. My brain likes repetition.)
So! You vote aggressive. I'm leaning that way too. It's making mixing the genres difficult.
I go for varied playlists depending upon whether it's for exercise (then I start slow, build, and finish slow) contemplation (stays slow) or certain forms of, um, recreation, when I like the pace very aggressive from the start. Randomised makes me think of a joke whose punch line was "and then the fire trucks came by!"
The key is playlists for every occasion--one for those "down" days featuring only ukulele music, one for working out with all the ass-kicking stuff, one for massages, etc. etc.
I think a pre-ordered playlist would drive me batty. Knowing that this song always follows that song and will always be superseded by the next song would very quickly make me pay as nuch attention to that as the exercising.
My recommendation: Don't worry about the ordering, put in one big playlist all the songs that make you want to move fast and aggressively, and then just let the iPod pick randomly from amongst those songs, so you never know what's coming up next.
It may not work for you, but for me the surprise would be part of the fun.
It's good to be paying attention to what song's coming up next, not the exercising, though. That's kind of the point. :-)
And, can I just say, I had a playlist, just a random bunch of my fave songs, before the Horrible Accidental Deleting, that I listened to all the time, and even now, if I'm like in a store or something and one of the songs that was on it comes on the sound system, my brain tells me what song is "supposed" to come next. It's kinda amusing.
It's the one major drawback to shuffle play... It absolutely ruins the "comes after" thoughtfulness into which our favorite musicians otherwise put so much effort. (Or our favorite mix-mixer).
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