The ultimate playlist to get you through your first day back in the gym

Well it’s a new quarter, which means it’s an opportunity to turn things around, start getting healthy, and hit the gym. To help you get started here’s a list of songs to add to your workout playlist that may help you through your first day at the gym.

Because standing in a sweat-smelling room, surrounded by gorgeous people who are way better at exercising than you, without having a pair of headphones to serve as a buffer is too terrifying to consider.

This is my piece of shit roommate who has been working out 4 days a week every week. I respect his muscles but hate him for having better discipline than I do. You think you’re better than me don’t you, Sammye? Why don’t you just shut up and drink your milk and let me live my life

“No Way Out But Down” by Graham Lindsey

This isn’t a song you listen to while working out. It’s one you play on your way to the gym. The folk sub-genre know as Southern Gothic deals with concepts of redemption, damnation, revival, hopelessness, humanity, all examined over tenuous, brooding string arrangements.

Pop this song on as you’re walking into the gym and think to yourself “What is a gym if not a church to worship the body?What are the treadmills and weight stations but altars of sacrifice to a bulging God of sweat?”

It’s your first day back at it, you are here for redemption.

You have come to pay penance for all the weeks of delivered pizza and Modern Family binges. As you cross the threshold into the fitness center for the first time in weeks, months, or ever your story is unfolding in a traditionally Southern Gothic fashion. Finding the discipline necessary to make this a routine, to show up with consistency is at this moment a singularly Herculean task.

Graham Lindsey understands this destitution of the spirit. He “went to the well, but the well was dry.” He “never had a prayer anyhow.” He will guide you through the gates of judgement. As you walk towards your reckoning remember: “There’s no way out but down.”

“Blockbuster Night Pt 1”- Run The Jewels

You have contemplated your struggle in relation to the plight of the American damned long enough and are now clambering your way onto a cardio machine, which for the sake of specificity lets just say is an elliptical because you have bad knees from a series of growth spurts in middle school and garbage genetics. Play this song because you need a door kick to signify your plunge into the realm of physical exercise, and this slaps like it’s trying to open the earth and swallow you whole. “Top of the morning/ My fist to your face is fucking Folgiers,” quoth Killer Mike. “Look at these kiddies Mike I’ma rat-a-tat ’em for livin’/ I deal in dirty work, do the deed and then dash, ditch ’em,” sayeth El-P over the incessant throb of distorted synths, pounding base, and violent breakbeat.

You begin your workout as you hear this, and you become the fist. You too deal in dirty work. You monster of violence, frantically running(kinda) in place and sweating in a frenzy of egomaniacal adrenaline. This is your debut. Your heart begins racing and when Mike asserts, “The gates of hell are pugnaciously pacin’, waitin’/ I give a fuck if I’m late, tell Satan be patient,” you understand fully just what the fuck he means.

“Too Easy”- Futuristic

You’re fifteen minutes in on the elliptical and whatever swell of drive you had has diminished. Sweat has pooled in every nook/crevice and has begun slowly running in warm rivulets down your shitty body. Rapping, for Futuristic, is too easy. Play this song to try and convince yourself that exercise, for you, is a similarly effortless endeavor.

Allow the rapid fire lyrics and amphetamine beat to envelop you in this lie. Do not listen to your body as it groans, creaks, and falters. Tell it, as you feel it slowly start to fail, that it is wrong. That exercise is “Easy like easy bake ovens.”

Realize the woman on the treadmill in front of you has more muscle definition in her butt than you do in your entire body. Wonder if if is appropriate to just be staring at someone’s butt while they’re trying to exercise. Is there some sort of unspoken gym etiquette in regards to butt staring? This is only your first day, you do not know how to navigate the politics of a fitness center. Try to focus on the music and stop looking at her butt. Look again in thirty seconds because you are weak of will.

“This Year”- The Mountain Goats

Play this song when you have one minute of cardio left. Ten seconds after you finish, John Darnielle will begin singing to you, “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.” You find the timing of this line in relation to your exercise poetic in a strange way. You think to yourself that you too will make it through this, and part of you believes that. Walk over to the drinking fountain to hydrate before heading into the weight-training portion of your workout.

Drink your fill and spend the remainder of the song staring, with a diffused awareness, at the cloudy steel basin of the drinking fountain. “Working out may help against the atrophy of muscle, but what of the atrophied soul?” you think. “One day death will come for me. It will creep across my body as a cold, constricting sleep.

Sweating in a room full of mirrors four times a week will do nothing to stop the end of my existence. I will make it through this, John Darnielle, of course I will, and it will kill me anyways.” Remember in the future to eat more before coming to the gym.

“Rude Boy (Mr. Vega Remix)”- Zeds Dead

The man next to you is half your size and bench pressing double the weight that you are. When he stands to stretch you notice his back muscles rippling like a fluid wall of granite. The man is a natural phenomenon. He is a cliff face of metamorphic rock in Yosemite that other men climb in hopes of getting a series on the Discovery Channel. You are not.

Your man-boob fat is already tender from the up-down movements of the elliptical, and now your heart feels a similar twang of overexertion. Lay back on the bench and begin pressing the 40 pound dumbbells while the jagged bass of Mr. Vega and Zeds Dead scrapes against the darkness in you like a rusty blade along midnight asphalt. Notice that the void in your chest is not, as you had imagined, empty. It is solid, and viscous, like a slab of bouillon. It spreads and clogs your vision, your ears, fills your mouth with bitter sorrow. Keep it up.

“S.O.B.”- Nathaniel Rateliff and The Nightsweats

Leave the gym to this revival/gospel celebration of self-destruction. Feel your heart match the tempo. Be sure to exit in slow-motion, which is exactly the pace your destroyed body, mind, and soul will naturally take up. Buy a large iced tea from the Starbucks connected to the gym.

Tell yourself this was meaningful, even though you know the truth now. Even though you know nothing means anything, not really.