A Guide to using Audiobooks for Cardio (for those that don’t like audiobooks)
If you don’t like cardio and you don’t like audiobooks, well… That’s rough because they go together perfectly! Here are some tips and tricks for anyone who has never been able to get into them.
Firstly, why audiobooks? Why not podcasts, TV, or real books? Well those are all fine choices, but they each have some issues. Podcasts are short form and depending on how much you love them, you can easily run out of episodes. TV and books both suffer from the same issue, and that is that most forms of cardio require you to be moving around a lot, which can make looking at a page or screen annoying at best and nauseating at worst. Audiobooks are long enough to keep you coming back for multiple cardio sessions and easy to have pumping into your ears as you exercise.
Search by Author
When people think of books they usually think of literature and the craft of writing, but audiobooks have a different dimension and that’s narration. The narrator of an audiobooks can make a book that you would normally never be interested and make it a must-listen, depending on who’s narrating.
Many of your favourite celebrities have no doubt written (or have had ghost-writtten) memoirs. In most cases (especially if they are actors) they will have narrated the audiobook version of their work as well. You can hear their emotions as they talk about different times in their life, making their words come alive in a way they never would if you’d only read them. A good example is an audiobook that I recently listened to, “Cruelly Yours,” by Cassandra Peterson (Elvira!).
Search by Performance
Just like a celebrity can really enhance their own book with their voice, they can enhance other books with their voices as well. There are many (many!) classic and contemporary novels and nonfiction books with powerful performances by the best actors in Hollywood. I recently listened to Tim Curry’s narration of “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” as one good example. Stephen Fry and Andy Serkis are two other very talented actors that greatly enhance any book they narrate.
Fiction vs. Nonfiction
If you have tried an audiobook in the past and didn’t care for it, it might just be an issue of genre. I am partial to reading fiction, but prefer listening to nonfiction. You might find that you have preferences like this as well. Try a variety of different genres and see if one resonates with you.
Go Long
One of the main reasons I love audiobooks for cardio is that they are LONG. We’re talking 10-30 hours, depending on the book and the speed of narration (I always listen at 1.4x). Why is this great? Well have you ever been sucked into a good book so thoroughly that you couldn’t put it down? The same can happen with an audiobook. You might hit your 30 minutes of cardio and find yourself on a cliffhanger. Perfect! Now you’ve got a great reason and motivation to attend your next cardio session.
At the end of the day, you’ve got to find what works for you, But if you’ve dismissed audiobooks in the past, I hope these tips inspire you to give them another try.