There are some times where I find my iTunes playlists inadequate. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Jason Mraz, Mumford and Sons, and Five for Fighting. It is just a bit hard to get into a good workout state of mind while listening to the soft piano stylings of John Ondrasik. Sometimes a good, edgy, fast beat is needed to help my brain stay with the fast bike intervals I may be doing. That is where Rock My Run entered the picture.

Years ago I read a blog about the science behind using certain beats per minute to help your run cadence. Some of the studies showed that using certain beats per minute correlated to being able to work harder. In fact, the music can help improve your performance by fifteen percent. The beats help you set the pace you want. They also allow your mind to maintain that pace throughout the workout. After reading that blog, I put the Rock My Run app on my phone and have been using it ever since.

Rock My Run is free to use, but, as with most things, you can pay for upgrades. On the free version, you get playlists created by a DJ to fit the beat range that you want. It has a GPS feature to track your distance and it connects to Apple Watches to allow you to control your music. The free version will have ads, which I found usually pop up every half hour, but last about 10-15 seconds. The paid version, which costs $2.99 per month, allows you to listen without the ads. It also adjusts to the tempo you are running at.

I am cheap and stick with the free version. Being extra cheap, I don’t even use my phone’s data when I run the app. Back when I signed up for the account, I must have gotten a free trial. I remember sitting and listening to tracks and downloading them to my “Favorites” in the app. This saved the playlists and allows me to use them without draining my data. One downfall of my cheapness is that I have been listening to the same 18 playlists for years. While it would be nice to hear something different, it is really the beats I am after. I get by just fine with what I have.

If you have an extensive iTunes library, you can find sites that will tell you the beats per minute of your songs. That just seems like a lot of work to look up each song and then create a new playlist just by the beats per minute. I prefer the easy, already created, playlists found in the Rock My Run app. Workouts have been much more consistent using these science-backed beats – speaking from experience.