Making Interval and Circuit Workout Mixes
People always ask how to time the workout circuits or HIIT cardio intervals if you're not looking at a readout on a machine. It does help to have a trainer, a stopwatch, or a giant wall clock that shows seconds. If you don't have any of those, I have a little secret to share. You can make your own timed circuit or interval mixes on your iPod. I'm sure you could do the same thing on any other music software or player, but I only know iTunes so that's what I'm going to attempt to explain. Hopefully, everybody's head won't explode trying to follow my lame instructions.

One day, while cursing Eddie Vedder for his endless rambling before live Pearl Jam songs, I made an astounding discovery. iTunes will let you mark a start and end time on each track. This was a major breakthrough! I could lop off all of the chit-chat and long rambling intros and start my songs at the START of the song. What a concept! Suddenly I was able to use great live songs in my workout mixes without hearing, "Hello Chiccaaaagooo!! This is a song off our new album, blah, blah, blah, clap, clap, clap..." when I was trying to maintain a pace.

In order to mark a song in iTunes:

highlight it in your music library
go to File and select Get Info
(or right click on the track and select Get Info)
a dialogue box pops up
click the Options tab
choose a start and stop time
click ok

Now that you understand that, here's what you do.

pick out a song
drag it into a new playlist
play it, watching the countdown timer
pause it where you want it to start
note the time and mark that as your start point
mark an out point 30, 60, 75, 90, or 120 seconds later
click ok

Pick out another song and mark a totally distinctive 10-15 seconds of it. This will be your fill music. Every time you hear it, you change exercises. Give yourself just enough time to get to the next exercise and set your weights.

Your paylist will go:

interval
fill
interval
fill
interval
fill

You can copy and paste the tracks to run them more than once. You can either alternate the same two pieces of music or get creative and make dozens of interval songs. Just be sure to keep the fill song the same so you know when to change exercises.

NOW, very important. You will have thoroughly jacked up much of your music library by marking new in an out points for your favorite songs. Here's how you fix it:

burn the newly created playlist to a CD
import the CD back into iTunes
look at your music library
each of those songs will now have a second short version
rename the new shortened tracks by adding a number or the word "edit" or "interval" to the title
drag these new edited tracks into their own playlist
go back and uncheck the start/end marks on your favorite songs

When you sync up your iPod, you'll have a new playlist that alternates timed intervals of music.

God, I hope that made some kind of sense. I have to get ready for work now, so I'm probably just going to confuse everybody and run. :-)