You wouldn’t guess it to look at me, but I enjoy exercising. No, honest, it’s true. Especially weight training or heading out for a little jog at the end of the day.

I can still get bored though, so I keep an eye out for new twists: a funky pair of socks, new equipment, and especially a new, entertaining workout. Lately I’ve been enjoying the online workouts at Nike.com: full-length, completely free workouts led by motivating, super-athletic but amazingly non-frightening trainers. Sure, they’re also showing off workout gear that you can order online with just a couple of clicks, but there’s no obligation to buy.

My main fave has been the Warrior Moves Cardio workout on nikewomen.com. It seems like a relatively low-key combination of shadowboxing and pilates with a thick layer of empowerment all over it. (Sample guidance from the instructor: “A warrior is someone who loves her body and her life and is dedicated to being all she can be.”) But the next day you discover that you’ve made extensive use of muscles all over the upper and lower body both — muscles that you may have forgotten but that will for several days scream for attention. If you can survive a couple of workouts of Warrior Moves, you really do start to respect your body.

But as of today I have a new contender for favorite workout: the OK Go Treadmill Workout. It’s available via iTunes and is sponsored by Nike, but the grand thing is that the trainer/narrator is my sweetie Damian Kulash, lead singer of OK Go.

Damian Kulash and Cindy, cheek to cheek

I don’t have easy access to a treadmill, and I already have the album versions of all but one of the songs included with it, but I bought the workout anyway and used it as my guide for this evening’s jog.

It’s a fairly basic interval training workout: warmup, come up to pace, then run intervals of increasing duration with recovery breaks in between, and finally come back down. All set to the music of — you know it — OK Go. And through it all there’s Damian, urging you to push a little harder here, take it easy there, get ready for the big interval now, etc.

And it’s quite a fine workout, assuming you enjoy upbeat indie-pop music and don’t mind having a cute-sounding guy say charming things to you while you run. I assume that Nike trainers and highly paid copywriters wrote the script, but it doesn’t feel terribly forced, and it is encouraging for real. I’ll know tomorrow just how hard I worked, but I felt like a pushed myself much harder than I would have just running to music.

Nike has a bunch of other workouts on iTunes also — search for Nike Sport Music for the full list. And anyone can submit a Sport iMix. Lots to choose from.

Or, if you’d rather not, you can always just enjoy the video one more time:

5 replies on “Gonna make you sweat”

  1. Okay, so we’re not the same person, as it turns out. When we show up at the same Web conference wearing the same shoes and clothes, with the same laptop in the same Timbuk2 handbag, we’ll be able to tell ourselves apart because I’ll be the husky one.

    I hate exercising.

    Phew! I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up.

  2. India: I’m both sorry and glad that we’re not the same person. Sorry because I liked the idea that I designed books. Glad because we can exchange tips on where to find great shoes and clothes and handbags.

    I’ll do my best to exercise enough for the both of us.

    Erich: Based on quick search results for Fartlek workouts, I think I would indeed enjoy them. Thanks for the suggestion.

  3. Thanks, Cindy! I appreciate your helping me out with that. And not a moment too soon–I was trying to do some shopping yesterday, but I found almost nothing in my size. If you could do some cardio and upper-body toning for us, that would be a great boon.

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