Adaptive workout entertainment
Our latest addition to the Shift toolkit
Shift is a workout app that mixes podcasts and music into your training. It plays podcasts during the recovery parts of the session, and music during work. Currently, there are two ways to enable this. Either by using an interval timer, or “manually” by tapping pause on your headphones. For cardio workouts, however, this is not always ideal. Often you just want to free-run without caring about timers or having to manually shift between podcasts and music. It would be great if there was some frictionless way to get podcasts during most of the workout, and still, get the benefit of blasting off to a song as you increase the intensity. This is what led us to our latest feature; heart-rate-controlled workouts.
Heart rate workouts
The concept is really simple. Set a threshold for when you want to shift, say at 160 bpm. You start out running to a podcast, and when your heart rate goes above this number, we shift to music. It’s up to you to keep the pace so that the heart rate doesn’t drop below the threshold. The music will push you as far as you can, and when you ultimately slow down again, and the heart rate drops below the threshold, we shift back to the podcast.
Hear how fit you are 👂
An interesting side-effect of this workout mode is that it will quickly tell you how fit you are. When it comes to conditioning training, how fast your heart rate recovers after a high-pulse period, is a good proxy for the effectiveness of your cardiovascular system. Now, at the point when you want to slow down and switch from music to podcasts, the sooner it shifts, the better your conditioning is. In other words, a clear expression of the effectiveness of your cardiovascular system.
What’s next?
“Heart rate shift” is still in the early works, and we’re exploring ways to make it even more adaptive to your workout. Personally, I don’t think we are quite there yet. For example, it can be slightly annoying having to wait for the heart rate to drop down to the threshold when you want to hear podcasts right away.
Interestingly, having played around with this workout style, some other ideas have come to mind as well. One concept could for instance be to let your pace control when the app shifts from podcast to music. E.g podcast while walking, and music while running.
We’d love to get some more feedback on these ideas and concepts! Feel free to drop me a DM or comment here on this post 🙏
