Ghostrunner’s soundtrack is amazing workout music

Time to sweat it all out

Back in the day, I used to have the fitness bug. I was in the gym often 4-5 days a week, I'd do classes and eventually, I even went and got a qualification allowing me to work in a gym. Due to covid, however, I never started even though I had secured the role and by the time covid had calmed down I had already moved on to other things in life.

However, it meant I would often crave new music to listen to when working out and I still to this day wonder what music I could use if I was teaching my own classes. Especially spin classes as they were my favourite or a general gym-based workout.

I loved cardio when I was in a class but hated doing it on my own. I always found it too mundane so to distract myself, I would usually listen to songs with lyrics so I could look like an idiot in the gym and mouth along with the words but that would be enough to entertain me during the repetitive motion I was going through for those 10-20 minutes. Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal’s music was especially good for this in particular the battle tracks Last Surprise and Take Over.

So where does Ghostrunner tie into all this? For those who haven’t played Ghostrunner, it’s a first-person parkour game akin to Mirror's Edge but you can’t get hit because if you do, you will have to redo the section again. The best workout music I think is ultimately music that gets you into a sort of trance and makes your mind and body feel connected and the Ghostrunner soundtrack really does that for me.

During weights-based workouts, I found that if the music was too fast-paced, I'd pay attention to the music a lot more than my exercise which would mean my form was bad and I could either not be doing the exercise properly or I was potentially risking injury. Therefore I learnt to slow the tempo down. On frequent occasions, I even listened to soul music to help with this.

The Ghostrunner soundtrack in general is truly special. If you haven't played the game or listened to the soundtrack I strongly recommend you do both. RateYourMusic suggests the genre is EBM or Darksynth which means that it has a strong, noticeable and catchy beat but is faster-paced and for me, not a million miles off House music.

Literally from the first track called Air, it firmly establishes itself as perfect workout music for me. The baseline I find is incredibly useful as I can time my reps along with it.

My weight exercises start with the biggest lifts that require most of my body and a decent break to catch my breath in between. Deadlifts or Squat Lifts are examples of the kinds of exercise I have in mind. These are compound exercises which means at least 2 muscle groups are used in your body to carry the exercise out.

They are usually tiring and so I need a good break in between each set to catch my breath back. As a result, they can take me around 10 mins to do before I move on to the next exercise. A few tracks of this awesome soundtrack will have played by this point and so Air just nicely flows into Infiltrator which keeps the heart rate up and still allows me to concentrate properly. It also has a similar tempo which means I also keep to a similar tempo when doing the required movement.

Often it slips into the 3rd track too called Blood and Steal. This piece of music starts a little slower and longer than the previous 2 tracks which gives me a chance to catch my breath back before it starts going hard again. By the end of this track or the next one, I'm ready to move on to the next exercise. If I do slip into the 4th track called Dharma and it again starts similarly slowly before picking up again.

What I like about Dharma though is the timing because often I am starting a different exercise and when this track goes hard it is usually faster than the previous tracks too. This pairs nicely because the gym instructor course taught me that you do the exercises that use most of your body at the start as they are the most intense and ease off as the body gets fatigued. It said typically do them free weights first, then machines. So my second exercise is typically another compound movement but a machine instead so the faster pace track works nicely here.

The small niggling issue I have with Dharma however is that it ends too sharply but Capture picks up the mantel well and carries on.

Gaming soundtracks are incredibly diverse. After all, games are too, sometimes we get to experience deep emotional stories and other times we get to just enjoy gameplay for what it is or even have silly comedic moments. Music is incredibly important to help portray these different emotions or gaming genres well. I often believe a sign of a bad game too is bad music because it meant it has either taken me out of the narrative or it doesn't gel well with what is happening on screen. Final Fantasy understood this a long time ago after all back on the PS1 with the consensus being the games seemed to have chosen music over voice acting due to space limitations. Those soundtracks are held in high regard still to this day. I have experimented with gaming soundtracks a lot during my workouts and found it works more often than you might think. Next time therefore when you head to the gym, give Ghostrunner or gaming music a shot to switch things up from what you typically listen to. Let me know what you think in the comments below and if you have a moment, please consider following us on here and Twitter/Mastodon.