Can Science Help You Build the Perfect Gym Playlist?
Not even Ronny Ho’s friends know exactly what she does for a living. They’re aware she works for Spotify, and they know she’s in charge of the streaming service’s dance and electronic music offerings. But they don’t know Ho plays a leading role in curating arguably the world’s most popular gym playlist. They don’t know that when they step into the gym, pop on a pair of headphones and hit play on Beast Mode, it’s Ho who’s providing the soundtrack to their sweat session.
For as long as people have worked out, they’ve worked out to music. In 2016, President Barack Obama revealed that when he wanted to escape from the rigours of his day job, he would head to the gym and exercise to the likes of Sinnerman by Nina Simone and Get Me Bodied by Beyoncé. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, meanwhile, divulged in 2021 that 2Pac, Metallica and Rage Against the Machine were all mainstays of his Iron Paradise playlist.
Music and fitness are so intertwined that its primary power – to transport us somewhere else and transform us into someone else – can often get overlooked. But if you were offered a pill that could delay fatigue, affect your mood, cognition and emotions, and make workouts feel easier with no reported side effects, would you take it? Music is essentially a legal performance-enhancing drug, and one that three in four UK gym-goers choose to get high on.
If you really want the good stuff, however, music needs to be specific and tailored – and more than just background noise. ‘If you’re listening to music when you’re training on the treadmill, you’re getting all these benefits,’ says Antony Stewart, digital fitness director for Johnson Digital. ‘That’s a massive advantage over the guy next to you, who’s just listening to what’s on in the gym – horrific gym-floor music.’
Five million people exercise to Spotify’s Beast Mode every month, making it one of the most popular workout aids in today’s health and fitness scene. But while its curation makes use of the latest techniques, there are greater advancements in the works when it comes to personalising the music soundtracking your workouts.
Man Vs Machine
Ho started working at Spotify in 2016, leaving a burgeoning career in finance to pursue her passion for music. She came to work on Beast Mode in October 2020. The reason she normally keeps her involvement with the playlist on ‘the DL’ is because she wants the real gossip on it from her friends. She wants to know the tracks that get them hyped and the songs they can’t stand, but, she says, it’s been easy to avoid detection because she isn’t exactly the kind of person people expect to be working on it anyway.
Beast Mode listeners are typically men, either millennials or Gen Z, who want to hear high-energy hits while they pump iron. To appeal to its followers, Spotify illustrates its playlist with an image of a hulking man with billowing pecs and a massive set of dumbbells resting on his knees. It’s music compiled with the intention of transforming its listeners into something big, aggressive and forceful. That isn’t Ho. But she is a fan of the playlist and often listens to it when she’s working out, both to check it and because like the millions of people who listen to it monthly, it gets her ‘super pumped’.
It’s also a prime example of one of Spotify’s ‘algotorial’ playlists, which means it’s created using a combination of editorial (man) and algorithmic (machine) insight. For ease, Ho prefers the term ‘personalised’.
‘A personalised playlist means that we select a pool of tracks so, let’s say, 200 tracks go in. These are all Beast Mode-level tracks,’ she says. ‘A hundred will go to each of the users, and it’ll be different for every user based on their listening experience on the platform. Someone who likes more hip hop and rock will have a different one to me. Mine’s mostly dance and things like that. So all of those tracks have been filtered and listened to and signed off by our editorial team, but [the resulting playlist] is different for each user.’
What exactly is a Beast Mode track? Spotify’s personalisation (PZN) team keep the exact secret sauce under wraps, but Ho explains that there are ‘hundreds of factors’ that go into the selection process. While algorithms may have increased Beast Mode’s popularity, there are no plans to remove human intuition. Editors like Ho still have a sense for what works and what doesn’t, and she explains that she likes to slip an unexpected track into the playlist where she can – like Montagem – PR Funk by S3BZS. The obscure hip hop variation phonk isn’t a genre that appears on Beast Mode often, but Ho’s recent addition is ‘crushing it right now’, she says.
On The Right Track
To understand how music affects your workouts, you might want to speak to Costas Karageorghis, a professor of sport and exercise psychology at Brunel University London. He began studying the link more than 30 years ago and has since written a number of studies and books, including Applying Music In Exercise And Sport, on the topic.
To him, personalisation is nothing new. Back in 2012, before the London Olympics, he worked with Team GB’s 400m hurdler Dai Greene and record producer Redlight to compose a piece of motivational music the athlete could listen to before races. ‘We discovered I was someone who didn’t like to get too hyped before a race,’ Greene tells Men’s Health. ‘I think there’s a common misconception that you need to be bouncing around and “up for it” before a race. I found it difficult to reach that point and was always more comfortable with less arousal pre-race. The task was to create a song that motivated me but didn’t push me too far.’
Right now, Professor Karageorghis is engaged in studying three specific strands of how music influences athletic performance. First, he aims to identify whether combining music with tech (such as virtual reality or augmented reality) can help regular people enjoy exercise more and lower their rate of perceived exertion. Second, he’s investigating how music can be used to rearrange electrical activity in the brain during exercise. His third focus is to explore the role that music plays in high-intensity exercise – because ‘theoretically, it should be less effective’.
At very high intensities – when you’re not sure if life will go on beyond your next rep – music no longer demonstrably reduces the pain you’re feeling because your mind is so consumed with survival. That doesn’t mean it’s having no impact. ‘There’s still the possibility that music will have a generalised motivational effect,’ he says. But, at high intensities – in a particularly challenging HIIT class, for example – you’re unlikely to feel less fatigued because of the music blasting through the studio’s speakers.
Surprisingly, Professor Karageorghis recommends that the athletes he works with train with no music at all. ‘To maximise the benefits of music,’ he says, ‘you really need to think about doing two workouts with music to one without. Just like any mild stimulant, you become desensitised to music and, over time, the benefits can be reduced. So using it when you most need it is likely to engender the most benefit.’
With all his experience, Professor Karageorghis still believes that the future of music and exercise lies in personalisation. But he doesn’t believe it’s restricted to just tailoring the tunes being delivered through your headphones. In the not-too-distant future, he thinks that gyms will be fitted with sensors that can track how a gym class is working out, as well as the intensity they’re working at and how they’re coping. Then, in real time, bespoke music playlists will be selected to get the most out of the group. ‘We’re not so far away from that,’ he says. ‘The technology actually more or less already exists. It’s just about weaving it together.’
Pump It Up
Last November, PureGym came to Antony Stewart with a problem. The gym group with over 350 sites in the UK and about 1.5 million members had little to no control over how music was being selected in its chains. Instructors were doing what they thought was best in their classes (or whatever they wanted) because all PureGym provided them with was access to a music library. But the gym chain was keen to gain greater control over the tracks being played, and for the music it did use to better match its programming.
Stewart works for Johnson Digital – a company he’d never heard of before he was poached from his position as head of group exercise at the health club Third Space. A subsidiary of Johnson Health Tech (the manufacturer behind several equipment brands, such as Matrix and Horizon), Johnson Digital has a film studio in High Wycombe from where Stewart has been conducting experiments into how music and training can best serve each other.
At Third Space, Stewart decided exactly how music was disseminated throughout the club. He ensured that tracks were downloaded from carefully chosen sources – no SoundCloud, streaming or YouTube allowed. In his personal life, Stewart was, is and always will be a muso who, for the past 25 years, has been producing dance music at what he describes as ‘a very middle-to-low level’. ‘I’ve had lots and lots of minor hits in hard house and hardcore,’ he says.
When he spoke to PureGym last November, Stewart had the solution to its problem, but he wasn’t quite ready to share it. Unbeknown to the gym chain, he had been working on a product called the BeatFit app, which uses something he refers to as ‘music differentiation’ to improve the quality of people’s workouts.
Music differentiation involves aligning music with what’s happening at any given stage of a workout. So, for example, if a fitness class requires you to work all out for 60 seconds and then rest for 60 seconds, there would need to be a clear distinction between the music you’re listening to when you’re trudging through reps and the music you’re listening to when you’re hunched over, resting. This can mean that you’re stitching together two separate tracks, rearranging existing songs or composing entirely new ones, tailored to your training. With the BeatFit app, Stewart says, you’re working ‘just like a music producer, curating the musical structure of your own workouts’.
‘I started to notice that I could train harder if I was practising music differentiation on my own phone, just jumping between tracks,’ Stewart says. ‘So I thought, if I can train harder, then maybe other people can train harder. Then when I was doing my master’s, I really wanted to do a quantitative study where we’re actually doing some proper experiments with it.’
One of the methods Stewart tested involved adjusting the volume: turning music up and down depending on whether a person was working or resting. That made people think their workouts were less taxing, but not as much as when a playlist was carefully curated to make the most of on and off periods. ‘We got qualitative feedback from participants, and the main thing that came through was the reduction in perceived exertion that comes from music being carefully curated,’ he says. ‘People work harder in that condition without realising it.’
A meeting has already been scheduled for Stewart to show PureGym a working version of his app. He’ll tell them that while working harder without realising will be good for serious gym-goers, it’s even more useful for people who don’t necessarily enjoy working out. Music, he’ll say, is a relatively untapped resource in fitness, and music differentiation is just one way of unlocking it.
‘What ordinary people want to get them off the sofa is the fun, the party, the hedonistic,’ he says. ‘If you look at it in psychological terms, it’s dissociation. They want to be taken away from what’s going on. They don’t want to be thinking about the physical feedback; they don’t want to be thinking about how many reps or sets they’ve got left. They just want to be taken away in the moment, and the number-one thing that will do that is music.’
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