Music, Not Steroids: Enhance Your Athletic Performance
It’s no surprise that people use music to achieve a variety of goals–pleasure, relaxation, motivation, and so on. But one use of music is particularly prominent: music as a means of making exercise more tolerable, even enjoyable. In some cases, it can even enhance athletic performance.
Anyone who has ever gone on a long run with their iPod or taken a particularly energetic spinning class knows that music can make the time pass more quickly. Apparently, music affects our perception of exertion: when you’re listening to music, you feel like you’re not working as hard. This is backed up by a number of studies, like the one done at Acadia University that demonstrated that women who ran while listening to music ran for a minute or two longer than those who didn’t. Makes sense–you feel better, youâ??re distracted, maybe even inspired, and you run longer. So, what else is at work here?
One component of music’s power to enhance athletic performance has to do with entrainment–the phenomenon of your body heart rate adjusting to the external stimulus of music. When you listen to music, your body seeks to entrain or synchronize with both the rhythm and the harmonic frequency of the music (Pinkerton, The Sound of Healing, 1996. 16). This is the rationale behind setting bpm (beats per minute) for different types of aerobic activities or seeking out â??happyâ? songs to make ourselves feel better. Music is selected for the way it affects us physiologically, to get the body (specifically the heart) moving or perhaps alter the emotion-producing chemistry in our brains. But entrainment is only part of the equation.
Another major part of the story is distraction. Music therapist Judith Pinkerton attributes the reduction in perceived exertion when listening to music while exercising to the brain’s inability to focus on more than one task at a time. As Sports Psychologist Michelle Cleere notes in an LA Times article, “Although your brain is really high-tech, it can’t think about two things at one time. If you have a genre of music that really gets you pumped and keeps you focused, it will distract you from negative thoughts.”
This brings me to the subjectivity of music selection. Does music you like help you perform better than music with which you have no association–or music that you don’t like? A study conducted by Southwestern University in Texas found that men cycling at a high intensity were able to exercise longer while listening to fast-paced music, and even longer while listening to music they liked (LA Times, Lisa Stein, 1995). This is supported by Kellyâ??s experience (from Fitness Fixation), which suggests that the meaning one applies to a piece of music is just as important as the tempo, pitch, or intensity.
It would seem that nearly every aspect of music can (and does) affect our physiologyâ??rhythm, harmonics, loudness, perceived meaning. No wonder we use it to spur ourselves on when we work out. Itâ??s like steroids without the pesky chemicals. Or the rage.
So, what music do you use to get a great workout? Can you feel yourself getting â??entrainedâ??
