Be very carefull not to damage your precious mp3 player.

There are 2 types of player on the market.
The larger capacity players (i.e. 10, 20 and 30 gig players) are HARD DRIVE players. Inside these players is a spinning hard drive. If you read the booklet that came with it you will see that the manufacturers clearly state that the player should not be bumped around (such as jogging etc.)

Other mp3 players (the smaller capacity ones) are FLASH drive players. There are no moving parts in these players and they can take a beating (jogging, hooping, crashing your mountain bike etc.)

I bought a 512mb FLASH player specifically for hooping. The capacity is small but it only has my fav. hooping tunes on it and is usually on shuffle play, so I get lots of variety during my 30 minute hooping workout.

I also have a larger hard drive player that I use daily, on the bus, while travelling etc.

Here is more info from this link:

reviews.cnet.com/4520-6450...324-1.html

(I'm not posting this info to bash iPod, just to show the info re. hard drive players)

"Jogging with a hard drive-based player is not cool."

The iPod and other high-capacity MP3 players use hard drives to store music. In order to extend battery life and avoid skipping, the hard drives turn on only every once in a while to fill up a flash-memory buffer, which itself has no potentially skipping, moving parts. The flash buffer, in turn, plays the music. If something jars a hard drive-based player at the precise moment when the hard drive is spinning to load the flash buffer, the player could skip. Some experts say that it's impossible to damage the drive in this way, but I'm not buying that--hard drives spin thousands of times per minute, and they have tiny, fragile parts. Instead, use a small flash player, such as something from the iRiver iFP-3xx line. They won't skip, the batteries last longer, and they're much lighter than the iPod.

p.s. I wear my flash player in a pouch around my neck (above my chest)