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Record Gym Videos and Play Music at the Same Time

Record Gym Videos and Play Music at the Same Time
Credit: Jacob Lund - Shutterstock

If you video yourself lifting—whether for form checks or just to share your day on Insta—you’ve probably noticed an infuriating flaw in the way our phones work: as soon as you start recording, the music in your headphones cuts out.

There are two solutions for this minor annoyance, each of which delivers slightly different results. One is a quick hack you can do without any special apps, and I learned about it from an offhand comment on an Insta post from powerlifter Serena Abweh: Turn on the camera app and record your screen.

To be clear: Don’t go to the video recording interface, and definitely don’t push the button to record. Just pretend you are looking at the camera thinking about what photo to take, and screen-record the process.

The result looks like this (you can crop out the controls, of course) and the sound will be whatever you were listening to through your headphones. Not elegant, but it gets the job done.

The other option is to use an app built for this exact purpose. Mideo is a popular one, and works exactly as advertised. It’s $2.99 on iOS and free on Android—but the latter requires a subscription if you want to save videos. Here’s one I took with Mideo:

This app records a proper video, with sound from your phone’s microphone. So if you’re listening through headphones while you lift, you’ll still be able to hear your music, but the soundtrack of your video will be heavy breathing and the clanking of iron plates, or whatever background noise your surroundings provide.