Moving to Music
- August , 2021
- Fitness Guru
- 0
What Purpose Does Music Serve During Workouts?
People listen to music all the time when working out. It doesn’t matter what form of exercise, people love listening to tunes. If you asked someone, do you get upset if you get to they gym and realize you forgot your music or headphones? The answer would almost certainly be a resounding yes. Music typically pumps up gym goers for their workouts. For some it is a great way to ignore others and lets them focus on their workout. While other people use it to take their mind off the workout so they can get through it easier.
Is Music Actually Helping Your Workouts?
The human tendency to listen to music when working out has inspired a number of studies to assess its effects. Overall, research suggests improved performance when listening to louder and upbeat music. Particularly, music seems to help more in a cardiovascular sense vs max strength output. For instance, research has found that upbeat music causes heart rate to increase and perceived exertion of the exercise to decrease. Thus, this led to an increased ability to run for a longer period of time because people did not think they were working as hard. However, when comparing difference in a one rep max (testing strength with a one repetition of max exertion), there was not much difference observed. These changes observed with music seem to effect both males and females proportionately equal.
Might as Well Play Music
While music can’t typically cause harm to ones ability to workout. Music does have the ability to cause hearing loss. To calm any nerves about that, here’s a statistic that was found according to the CDC…Listening to music at 80-85db (lawn mower or leaf blower level) for under 2 hours won’t cause long term damage. Even if it reaches 95 db(motorcycle noise level), damage becomes possible after 50 min. Say you’re someone who doesn’t control the music because you go to workout classes. If that is the case, then tell you’re trainer about these benefits and get that loud upbeat music going!
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2019, October 7). What noises cause hearing loss? Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/hearing_loss/what_noises_cause_hearing_loss.html.
Patania, V. M., Padulo, J., Iuliano, E., Ardigò, L. P., Čular, D., Miletić, A., & De Giorgio, A. The psychophysiological effects of different tempo music on Endurance versus High-intensity Performances. Frontiers. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00074/full.
Thakare, A. E., Mehrotra, R., & Singh, A. (2017, April 15). Effect of music tempo on exercise performance and heart rate among young adults. International journal of physiology, pathophysiology and pharmacology. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5435671/.
