Classical music to fuel your daily workout

Here's an excerpt from an article I wrote for Classical Minnesota Public Radio. Read the full article here. 

Even for classical music lovers, classical isn't often the go-to genre for exercise music. Many people prefer steady, pulsing music for their workouts, but classical music is full of dynamic shifts: even loud, forceful pieces typically have at least one quiet passage, so if you turn the volume up to hear these passages, your ears might suddenly be blasted with fortissimo trombones or earsplitting percussion.

[...]

If you can see past the volume shift drawback, the classical canon does offer some killer workout music. "Killer" seems an especially appropriate adjective in this case, because most of the music I chose is programmatic with elements of militarism or ferocity. I created this playlist especially for strength training, but I think it would also accompany cardio workouts well.

1. “Mars”
From Gustav Holst's The Planets. An obvious choice, but undeniably effective. 

2. “Lord Melbourne (War Song)”
This 5th movement of Lincolnshire Posy by Percy Grainger has plenty of aggressive brass. 

3. “Festive Overture”
A more cheerful but still invigorating selection. I always thought this Dmitri Shostakovich composition was written for concert band, but I recently learned it was originally an orchestral piece. 

 
See the full playlist and videos here. 

How You Can Be an Expert, Too

(Note: This is part a column originally published in Fargo-Moorhead Stride magazine.)

My first idea for this column was to somehow find a fresh take on New Year’s resolutions—probably a hopeless task. Then I learned that this issue of Stride would feature experts in different categories who can help people achieve their New Year’s goals. This got me thinking about expertise and how it affects people’s perspectives on fitness. Though fitness experts have a lot to offer the rest of us, it’s worth examining how expertise can also hold us back. It’s worth asking when the expert/non-expert distinction is helpful and when it isn’t.

 
A sign posted at my gym states that only two percent of people achieve the results they want without a personal trainer. While this statistic leaves several specifics unanswered—like, is this within a certain time period?—it seems to make a pretty strong case for expertise in the form of personal training. Everyone who exercises benefits from other kinds of expertise, too, whether they realize it or not. Physiologists have improved our understanding of how the human body works, and sports medicine physicians help treat and prevent exercise-related injuries. 

On the other hand, thinking critically about experts and expertise from time to time is prudent. If someone is unwilling to start an exercise program without first consulting a trainer, and this prevents her from even going on half-hour walks a few times a week, I’d say that’s a problem. This sort of appeal to expertise is probably linked to procrastination, at least in part.  

To give a less extreme example, someone might be unwilling to try new equipment at the gym because he hasn’t gotten thorough, one-on-one training on the equipment. Again, training has value—maybe after a few solo attempts, in this situation—but as long as he has enough knowledge to prevent injury, this guy should just go for it.  

Read the rest of the article here, on pages 9-10.  

 

Think as a Roman Thought, Part 3: “While you’re alive and able”

This morning the top headline of my local newspaper was “Is today really the most depressing day of the year?” The article’s conclusion: maybe. “New Year’s resolutions have gone south, and you’ve gone pear-shaped,” it offered as a source of depression, along with holiday bills and crummy weather. (The windchill is -37° F where I am now, so that part seems plausible!)

Anyone exposed to even a moderate amount of media has probably seen a handful of stories recently about how to stick to New Year’s resolutions and other goals, including exercise-related ones. Today I offer the perspective of Marcus Aurelius, that frequent ponderer of human mortality. His Meditations often circles back to the brevity of human life and its implications. While these passages aren’t as fun and easy to implement as some of the resolution tips I’ve seen, they are helpful in their own way. Some examples: 

Book 2, No. 4: “Remember how long you’ve been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn’t use them. At some point you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.” ¹

Book 4, No. 17: “Not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you. Death overshadows you. While you’re alive and able—be good.”²

Book 4, No. 48: “Don’t let yourself forget how many doctors have died, after furrowing their brows over how many deathbeds. How many astrologers, after pompous forecasts about others’ ends. How many philosophers, after endless disquisitions on death and immortality. . . And all the ones you know yourself, one after another. . .

In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. To pass through this brief life as nature demands. To give it up without complaint. Like an olive that ripens and falls. Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on.”³

Image source: thierryhennequinfineart.com

Marcus Aurelius wasn’t the first to comment on this subject, and he certainly wasn’t the last. These three passages remind me of the Jeopardy tool from the psychology book The Tools (see my review here), which urges people to visualize themselves on their deathbed in order to galvanize themselves into action. And the Tools authors quote Samuel Johnson: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Johnson’s remark is almost cheerfully blunt; sometimes Marcus’s words are dismally so. “Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.” Marcus’s more optimistic phrases don’t undercut that reality, but they are worth remembering when we falter in our fitness resolutions. “While you’re alive and able—be good.” “Like an olive . . . thanking the tree it grew on.” 

We will die. Soon. But we’re not dead yet. Let’s seize the chances we have now to exercise. Like other Romans said, carpe diem.  

1. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Gregory Hays (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 16.

2. Ibid, 36.

3. Ibid, 42-43.