The Ultimate Workout Playlist

It’s truly summertime now, and everyone’s trying to obtain that beach body they failed to sculpt over the spring. Joggers and runners and group yoga classes have left the Equinoxes they presumably hibernate in throughout winter and are out in the streets and parks. Last month — during the raging heights of wedding season — I looked at what songs people played at their wedding receptions. So, now we arrive at this question: What’s the ultimate workout playlist?

Rather than crowdsourcing this like I did for the wedding playlist, I went right to the source: the streaming music service Spotify. Eliot Van Buskirk, who writes about Spotify’s data on the company’s blog, and Spotify programmer Paul Lamere, sent me a data set of playlists with “workout” in the title. I narrowed that down to playlists with at least an hour’s worth of music (to eliminate half-finished playlists with only a few songs) and playlists that saw at least one play per week by its creator (I wanted to exclude people like me — you know, the kind of guy that has made a workout playlist but hasn’t seen the inside of a gym since Pokemon Red).

Here’s the list of songs with the most appearances:

That’s a rather solid list. It’s filled with high-energy hip-hop and pop, which is pretty much what I expected we’d see. No foul intended towards, say, indie rock, but I would have been shocked if Neutral Milk Hotel made the cut. Kanye’s “Stronger” is such a good workout song it almost makes me want to exercise. Eminem is an ex officio presence based on decades as a go-to artist to pump iron to — “Lose Yourself” does for workout scenes in movies the same thing that “Jingle Bells” does for movies set around the holidays. And I would have been appalled had “Remember the Name” by Fort Minor not shown up in the top tier.

Down the list further, in 32nd place, is DMX’s “X Gon Give It To Ya,” which is the correct answer to “what is the best song on your workout playlist?”

When it comes to artist presence, the list skews towards popular rap and pop artists with high energy material:

Drake’s spot at the top is a total enigma to me, but appearances from Linkin Park, Kanye West and Lil Wayne make sense.

But many of these songs show up on a lot of workout playlists simply because they’re super popular songs — they show up on all types of playlists. What songs most disproportionately appear on workout playlists given their overall popularity on the Spotify service? Spotify also pulled the raw overall popularity of tracks on their service, and I was able to use that to figure out the songs that punched above their weight.¹

The above table includes all genres, but the most disproportionately exercise-worthy rock songs, if that’s more your speed, come down past that top 20. There’s “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys at No. 33 and a whole bunch of Metallica — “Ride the Lightning” (No. 26), “For Whom The Bell Tolls” (No. 29) and “Seek & Destroy” (No. 38).

There’s also the question of what makes a song good for working out to. What do the popular workout songs have in common?

Here’s one thing I found: Beats per minute (BPM), not surprisingly, has quite a bit to do with what makes a workout song a workout song. There’s a reason we do not see a bunch of plaintive ballads on workout playlists. For a song to do its job, you ideally want it to keep you moving.

Indeed, apparently you want it to keep you moving to the tempo of about 130 BPM. Spotify has data on song tempo, and — with some additional help from Van Buskirk — I was able to put together the most common observed tempos for the music in the set.

So what does that mean for you? Popular songs that people workout to at about 130 bpm include “Black Skinhead” by Kanye West, “Hotline Bling” by Drake, “Shut Up and Dance” by Walk the Moon, “Bitch Better Have My Money” by Rihanna, “Run the World” by Beyonce, “Timber” by Pitbull, “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC, “Work Bitch” by Britney Spears and, naturally, the best song ever, “Danza Kuduro” by Don Omar. If you want to hit the perfect workout tempo, that’s probably the best place to start.

Here are the top 200 most commonly appearing songs on workout playlists: