If you’re into any endurance sport, you probably have seen a physical therapist more times than you care to remember.  A good PT is a magician in fixing your body but sometimes the elaborate routines of exercises that they assign can be a little daunting.  Some people are fine with reading the exercises off a sheet of paper, remembering all the cues that their PT warned them about for each exercise, and then mechanically going through the steps to make it happen.  I wouldn’t be one of those people.  Combine a highly perceptible degree of boredom with a virtually imperceptible degree of confusion/stress from having to figure out the exercise and, well, the exercise just doesn’t get done. Eliminate the second part (confusion/stress) and doing an exercise routine seems so much easier.  I think this is one of the reasons why exercise videos and classes have so much better consistency than just trying to do an exercise program out of a book.

A while back I came up with an idea of making my own exercise MP3 files to guide my PT routines using just my computer and Garage Band (which comes free with a Mac).  It’s easy to record a short clip for each exercise– and it’s even easier to arrange the tracks in Garage Band and export them into a custom exercise program.  Here’s a little YouTube video that I made a while back that describes the process.

I’ve been following this system for years now and have built up a whole library of different exercises that my physical therapist has assigned me.  Sure, it’s a little more work up front, but when you’re in the gym, it just makes it all go by so much faster and easier.  More importantly, the PT routines actually get done.