Use Your iPhone for Music While Teaching Classes

If you are a fitness instructor who frequently needs to play music while teaching, your iPhone can be a great way to organize and play your favorite tunes. However, nothing is worse than to have your text message alert or phone ring through the speakers at full volume in the middle of a class. Many people use a separate iPod or music player to get around this problem, but is it really necessary to buy another device? Of course not! Your iPhone is the perfect playback device if you know a couple basic tweaks to stop other sounds from interrupting through the speakers.

The first step is pretty obvious, and that is to place the phone in mute mode via the hardware switch on the side of the phone. This will prevent the phone from lowering the volume of the music playing if a calendar or reminder alert goes off and will also prevent the alert sound from playing through external speakers.

The second is to open your Settings app and switch Airplane Mode to “On.” This will turn off the phone’s ability to communicate with the cell phone network, and will disable the wifi and bluetooth radios, effectively turning the phone into a very basic iPod. And that’s it! You can now attach your iPhone to external speakers via a cable or by docking it and be safe from other sounds interrupting your workout and class! Just don’t forget to turn off Airplane Mode and un-mute the phone afterward or your family and friends might wonder what has happened to you!

Now that you know how to make your iPhone play flawlessly, you might want to take a look at a way to change the tempo of the music on-the-fly. An excellent solution is available in the App Store called Tempo Magic Pro (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tempo-magic-pro/id390593407?mt=8). It is not cheap at $4.99, but can play the music and playlists you have stored on your iPhone (or in iCloud) and either automatically adjust the beat to match a pre-set number, or you can manually adjust it during playback. It can be altered anywhere from +50% to -50%, and a nice touch is that Tempo Magic gradually speeds/slows the music so the effect is not jarring. There are other apps out there that do this (some for free), but this one seems to be the only specifically targeted to the fitness crowd’s needs.

To make Tempo Magic do its magic, launch the app, tap on the music note icon in the lower left corner, add music or playlists (preferable for uninterrupted playback) by tapping on the blue “+” icon next to their names, tap done in the upper right corner, then hit play. You can manually adjust the playback tempo by moving the slider up and down or tapping on the up/down arrows, or once you have selected your preferred BPM, tap “Lock BPM” and all the music that is played from that point on will play back at that preset BPM.

You are now all set to use your iPhone for your fitness classes!