What’s your workout playlist?
According to a 2005 study, the music you listen to during your workout makes a BIG difference.
People work harder, have more fun, and lose more weight when they work out with music. If you’ve ever left your MP3 player at home and had to work out without music, you know exactly the difference it makes.
We asked a few members what music motivates them; let’s take a look:
busy91 suggests:
Don’t Cha (feat. Busta Rhymes) - The Pussycat Dolls
Get The Party Started - Pink
Nemesis (The Arch Deviant Mix) - Shriekback
Broken Heart - Red Flag
I Love Rock And Roll - Joan Jett & The Blackhearts
Low Rider - War
Mickey - Toni Basil
My Wave - Soundgarden
MY TYPE - Fumiya Fujii
Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye - Steam
The Game - Motörhead
Sad But True - Metallica
jpayne’s Cardio mix:
Blondie - Call Me
Dan Reed Network (From The Cutting Edge Soundtrack) - Baby Now I
Matchbox 20 - How Far We’ve Come
Michael Simbello - Maniac
Nelly Furtado - Maneater
Prince - Let’s Go Crazy
Katrina & The Waves - Walking On Sunshine
Rascal Flatts - Backwards
Rodney Atkins - If Your Going Through Hell
Pink - U + Ur Hand
New Order - Bizarre Love Triangle
Gibtown’s Cardio mix;
1. Alicia Keys - No One
2. The Fratellis - Flathead
3. The Hives - Tick Tick Boom
4. Mika - Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)
5. Jaime Lidell - A Little Bit More
6. Matchbox Twenty - How Far We’ve Come
7. Michael Jackson - Wanna Be Startin’ Something 2008 Remix with Akon
8. Nickelback - Rockstar
9. The Pipettes - We Are The Pipettes
10. Seether - Fake It
11. Ingrid Michaelson - The Way I Am
See more playlists in the Community forum.
What’s the music that motivates you?
Way to go Sue!
Podfitness member Sue Slutsky was profiled last night on ABC Action News Tampa as part of a story on Podfitness.
Sue joined with the Discovery Health National Body Challenge, and has lost weight, toned up, and now uses her treadmill for more than just a clothes rack!
Sue, thanks for being an inspiration to the rest of us that are, shall we say, in a lull in our weight loss plans. The point of the piece is that Sue proves you don’t need celebrity status (or celebrity $$$) to have the tools and dedication it takes to look great.
You’re probably dehydrated right now
I don’t drink enough water and more than likely you don’t either. In fact, recent studies have shown that 75% of the American population is dehydrated.
Whenever I have been dieting in the past, water consumption has seemed to play a huge role in it’s success or failure. Rather than reach for a snack I would make it a point to reach for that Nalgene water bottle. (not a hippie) It’s always paid off, but I think on the surface I always attributed its success to not drinking as much soda or other sugary drinks. But after finding out about all the powerful benefits of drinking more water, I’m willing to give H2O a little more credit.
Check out some of the benefits of drinking water:
- Dehydration is a major contributor to many diseases; conversely good hydration reduces the risk of disease.
- Just 5 glasses of water every day decreases the risk of breast cancer by 79%, colon cancer by 45% and bladder cancer by 50%.
- Chronic dehydration causes: asthma, arthritis, kidney stones, gall stones, hypertension, cardio vascular diseases, weight gain, migraines, loss of muscle tone and digestive complications.
- Most adults lose between two and three quarts of water a day without exercising.
- One quart of water is lost during a night’s sleep.
- Caffeinated drink cause the body to discharge water.
- Water prevents DNA damage and makes its repair mechanism more efficient. It also increases the efficiency of the immune system in bone marrow, including its efficiency against cancer.
- Water reduces fatigue, and the incidences of morning sickness in pregnancy. It also helps reduce stress, anxiety, depression and constipation.
- Lack of water is the #1 reason for daytime fatigue and performance reduction.
- Just a 2% drop in body fluid causes a 20% reduction in mental and physical performance.
- Drinking water is crucial for weight loss programs.
- Even mild dehydration can slow metabolism as much as 3%.
- On a diet? 1 glass of water shuts down midnight hunger.
- Water makes skin smooth, helps decrease the effects of aging, and gives luster and shine to the eyes.
- Dehydration prevents sex hormone production, a primary cause of impotence and loss of libido.
- Water helps prevent memory loss as we age.
So come on, drink more water! As if the above reasons are not enough…
4 Food Surprises
After hearing the same things for ages, it starts to get old. Yes, yes, we know we’re supposed to eat more fruits and vegetables. OK, we get it, we need to get more exercise. And we know we’re not supposed to take four hamburgers, smash them into some sort of super-hamburger, and barely choke it down with the help of a 44-ounce Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookie Milkshake (geez, do this once, and you hear about it for weeks)!
DrWeil.com has a few surprising facts about food that you probably didn’t already know.
For instance:
“Crush garlic, then wait 10 minutes before cooking, to maximize health benefits.”
Really? That’s it? I can do that.
It’s refreshing to hear something new, easy to implement, and based in science. These tips may not completely break me of the desire to eat vegetables exclusively in fried form, but it’s a start.
Check out the rest of the tips at DrWeil.com’s The Healthy Kitchen.
Don’t just sit there!
You may want to stand up before reading this. Researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia found that sitting shuts off enzymes required for burning fat (1). Not only do these enzymes play an important role in fat burning, but they are also involved in controlling cholesterol, triglyceride levels, and other metabolic risk factors. To explore just how big an effect sitting might have on our metabolism, they compared the positive effects of vigorous exercise with the negative effects of sitting. To their surprise, there was a more profound change in key enzymes in muscle tissue as a result of sitting, than there was from vigorous exercise. What this means is, like exercise, the body responds to sitting as something it must adapt to, and the sitting-signal is just as, if not more, powerful than vigorous exercise. The body adapts to sitting by shutting off enzymes required to burn calories!
The authors of this research warn that this creates a new concern with potentially major clinical and public health significance. The fear is that the average sedentary person may become even more at risk for major diseases such as Type-II diabetes and cardiovascular diseases in the coming years if they sit too much.
The take home message for you and me is that we need to be aware that as we sit, we are changing our bodies for the worse. Taking the opportunity to stand and walk around can have a significant impact on our ability to manage our weight. For example, stand up while talking on the phone, or take a walk around the office “on the hour” during the work day.
1. Hamilton MT, Hamilton DG, Zderic TW. Role of low energy expenditure and sitting in obesity, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Diabetes. 2007 Nov;56(11):2655-67.
Finally Bust the Cravings: 10 Must-Read Tips
Cravings are a tricky thing. Psychologically, they seem like a “need”, but are actually a “want”, and it’s rarely in our best interests to give in to them.
OK, so they’re not all must-read. However, several of these tips are things you wouldn’t normally think of, though they make complete sense.
My favorite:
Distract yourself. If only ice cream will do, it’s a craving, not hunger. “Cravings typically last ten minutes,” says John Foreyt, PhD, of Baylor College of Medicine. Recognize that and divert your mind: Call someone, listen to music, run an errand, meditate or exercise.
Read all 10 tips at RD.com. Maybe next weekend I’ll use some of these tips, rather than have a three-day caloric bender, where I vaguely remember eating Oreo filling from a bucket.
Music, Workouts, and Podfitness: The Definitive Guide
First off, welcome back to the Podfitness Blog! Right now, we’re retooling our blog to be more relevant to what you, as a Podfitness member, care about, and we’d like to welcome our newest blogger, Heather.
One of the new features of our blog is the “Definitive Guide” series, a (mostly ironically-named) series of guides for Podfitness newbies and veterans. Today’s guide is here to answer the question:
If music is so important to Podfitness, why doesn’t Podfitness come with music?
A big chunk of the DNA of Podfitness is music. By now, we’d guess most people know how beneficial music is to their workouts, and several studies have been done proving this point.
Podfitness was built largely on the idea that people would rather hear their own music during a workout than someone else’s idea of good music. Our team spent a great deal of time and effort building the technology to make this possible, and now we have a really cool mixer that lays personal training over music from your own computer, makes sure you can hear both at all times, and gives you a complete workout, ready to take to the gym (or wherever).
But there are 2 reasons this can trip up some people:
1. Not all music could be mixed with Podfitness workouts. Music that is locked down with DRM, such as many iTunes Music Store purchases, are unable to be unlocked for use with Podfitness (or anything else, for that matter).
2. Not everyone has a pre-defined list of music to use with their workouts, and some people would rather work out with “fitness music” that an instructor picks to match the workout.
How do we plan to fix this?
1. There’s a short-term workaround with DRM-protected music: You can burn your purchased music to CD and re-import the disc to remove the DRM. It’s kind of a pain, but we have confirmed that this does work.
Long-term, the issue of incompatible music is pretty much fixing itself: DRM is dying fast. All the music you buy from Amazon MP3, and much of the music in iTunes is now DRM-free, and can be freely used with Podfitness.
2. We want to make the transition easy for people that don’t already have music to mix with their Podfitness workouts.
Starting this week, we’ll be publishing “workout playlists” created by the staff at Podfitness, our trainers, and by our Community members (that’d be you). You can buy the songs at Amazon, and they’ll be dropped into iTunes, where you can use them for your next workout.
Also, we’d like to recommend the fantastic workout music at Power Music. It’s a bit spendy, but they’re known for making the best workout music out there.
Longer term, we have lots of ideas for a way to tie Podfitness with music more tightly, and we’d love to hear your opinions. We have 2 questions for you:
What music motivates you during your workouts?
How can Podfitness better integrate music?
Sound off in the comments, or as always, drop us a line at: info [a t] podfitness [d o t] com!
Can I get a canburger with that shake?
A friend turned me on to this delicious invention. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Are people actually eating these? What a sad sad world we live in. If you are going to eat a cheeseburger, you might as well make it worth your while and eat a hot one.
I suppose in their defense, they are great for taking on the road or camping. But I suppose if you feel like you really need to take a canburger on a backpacking trip then you deserve each other.
And let’s face it, there is no way it looks like the picture when it comes out of the can. Somehow I can envision anything but a soggy mess.
From the Forums: How Many Songs Can I Have In a Playlist?
jliddil had a great question this week that hasn’t made its way to our FAQ page yet.
He writes, “It seems that with a playlist of 100 songs or more don’t load completely in the mixer. As I scroll down the list if songs becomes blank and nothing is listed after a given artist.”
Content expert Chris Kluge sets the record straight about playlists and Podfitness: “Yes there is a playlist limit of 200 songs for PC. We do this so everything loads up quicker and you don’t have to wait as long. I have a lot of songs I use for variety, so I just break them down into genre lists: metal list, rock list, other metal list.”
On the PC, you’re limited to the first 200 songs in your iTunes or Zune playlists (mostly since loading your songs into your web browser is no small feat).
On the Mac, there’s no limit set specifically, but it’s highly advisable to keep playlists you intend to use with your Podfitness workouts under 200 songs, since the more songs it has to load, the longer it takes.
Or maybe staring at that spinning beach ball is your thing. Who are we to judge?
Keep the questions coming, we’ll keep picking the best of the week for our “From the Forums” feature!
Are you eating food? Or just “food-like substance”?
According to author Michael Pollan, what you’re eating might not be food at all, but an “edible food-like substance”. In his new book, In Defense of Food, Pollan contends that as a society, our study of food as the sum of its nutrients is way off.
This is the second recent book we’ve seen that directly confronts the way we study nutrition (along with Good Calories, Bad Calories). Both assert that our entire understanding of nutrition is skewed by giant, powerful “edible food-like substance” manufacturing companies.
The problem for me is that I love food, and I love these engineered food-like substances. Sure, a crusty French bread, rare steak, and some well-prepared vegetables are great, but who doesn’t love a Pop-Tart fresh from the toaster?
Are these guys overreacting, or is there some sort of major breakdown in our understanding of nutrition?
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