In My Spin Class, Playlists (and BPM) Are More Important Than You Think
I got a funny email from the cycling app Join the other day, letting me know that after analyzing more than 13,000 public spin playlists, the company had some insight into how important beats per minute (BPM) is to cycling workouts. As a spin teacher, I know all about this, but I still found it funny to see what songs popped up most often for people who were creating their own playlists. I’ve written in the past about creating a great cardio playlist , but a spin playlist is a whole other ballgame. If you want to replicate the spin class or Peloton experience yourself, here’s what you need to know.
What’s going on with BPM?
When I started teaching four years ago, I was strictly a vibration-based instructor. I found songs that were fun, engaging, and loud, then put them together into a 45-minute playlist, put a little movement to them, and thought I was doing a great job. But I started paying more attention to other people’s classes when I took them and joined a few online communities for instructors, and before I knew it, I was thinking a lot more about BPMs, cardio zones, and the overall goals of each class. Did you know that a lot of the big gyms actually pay their instructors an extra hour each week to compensate for the time it takes us to come up with our playlists? I didn’t know until I started teaching, and at first I thought it was cute but over the top. But now that I’m actually putting in the serious time to apply science to my playlists, I think it’s pretty fair.
Science? Yes, science! Research has shown the impact of fast music on exercise duration, intensity, and effectiveness quite clearly : When the BPM goes up, so does your heart rate, especially in spin classes, where you can more easily match, as I always remind my students, “your feet to the beat.” On a treadmill, you can’t always slam your soles into the belt with every beat; that could be dangerous. But strapped to a humble, low-impact stationary bike, you certainly can, which means you can elevate your heart rate in a variety of cardio zones. There’s even a word for it: entrainment , which is the phenomenon that occurs when your body naturally syncs up with rhythmic stimuli.
Everyone’s cardio zones are a little different, but I like to think of it like this: Zone 1 is 50-60% of your max heart rate, Zone 2 is up to about 70%, Zone 3 is up to about 80%, Zone 4 is up to 90%, Zone 5 is up to 100%. Warming up in Zones 1 and 2 before spending serious time in Zones 3 and 4, and a few tiny bursts in Zone 5 is just perfect.
To be clear, you are not expected to push your foot into every beat. You can do half a beat or two. So you might want to keep your BPM around 130, but that won’t consistently translate into 130 revolutions per minute (RPM) of the pedals. Instead, it will be around 65 RPM. That’s okay. According to the research linked above, even listening to faster music while you exercise can increase your exertion and perception of it.
In general, I try to keep most of the songs on my playlist in the 120 to 180 range, varying the resistance I ask for each (which affects the RPM). You may find that you can go much faster for longer periods of time, or that you have a hard time maintaining these ranges. Standard spin classes can help, as instructors tend to tailor their playlists to meet people right in the middle of the various fitness levels that may be represented in the gym.
Choosing the Best BPM for Your Workout
If you’re creating your own playlist, start with slower songs, fill the middle of the playlist with faster ones (and keep the resistance low) and mid-slow ones (for high resistance), and add a super-fast track whose rhythm you can repeat at 10- or 15-second intervals. Program some recovery periods, too. I like to choose songs where the chorus gets faster and the verses are a little slower, so we move back and forth while maintaining – you guessed it – the rhythm. The recovery periods are built like this. Finish with a few slower songs.
You might think it would be easy to hear a song and recognize whether it is “fast” or “slow,” but that’s not always the case. You can use websites to determine the BPM of a given song. I like the aptly named SongBPM .
You can also get inspiration from other people. That study I mentioned earlier is a good place to start. Join found that the most popular song to spin is AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” According to SongBPM, it has a BPM of 137. The average BPM of the most popular songs in that dataset is about 127.98. My participants really like it when we play Elley Duhé’s “Money on the Dash (Sped Up)” (150 BPM) or Vengaboys’ “Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!.” In fact, if you get stuck, you can follow my personal playlist , which I update every other day.
What to keep in mind
Don’t be intimidated by any of this. As long as you’re on the bike and moving, you’re doing great — and I remind my participants of this all the time. If you get too caught up in your BPM and RPM and all the science and zones, you can get distracted from the relatively simple task of just getting a workout in, which isn’t ideal. If you’re having trouble creating a playlist that works for you, take a few spin classes to see what the instructors do — but again, don’t worry too much. It’s much more important to find songs that you enjoy riding to and that actually get you on the bike than to aim for the perfect heart rate zone and put together a playlist based on science. It will all come with time.