Music is an art that enriches the quality of our lives with its harmonious blend of vocal or instrumental sounds. An important aspect of music’s relationship with humans is its ability to evoke our emotions and simultaneously transform into a medium for emotion modulation. Most people play uplifting music when dealing with various stressors in life such as waiting in traffic or facing heartbreak. We celebrate some of the best moments in our lives with a specific song in the background.
The interaction of music and exercise is beneficial to your lifestyle. There are various music apps that can be tuned in while exercising. More often than not, everyone has their exercise song which gets them through fitness routines. Headphones are almost a necessity when people head to an indoor or outdoor space to exercise. They are as essential as a water bottle, proper exercise gear, and a face towel for most gym-goers.
Music And Exercise
Listening to music can affect your exercise performance in a positive way. There are ten benefits of listening to music while you exercise.
1. Enhance Your Motivation
Music can cause your brain to release dopamine, a chemical that regulates motivation and reward mechanisms in the thought processing centers. As a result, listening to music when exercising, can directly pump you up to rise to the occasion and tackle a task at hand. This pattern of physiological response is especially relevant to a workout because it is a considerably taxing activity that causes strain to the physiques. A piece of evidence to this phenomenon can be dated back to 1911, where an American investigator named Leonard Ayres discovered that cyclists seemed to pedal at a faster rate with a band playing in the background than when it was silent. With the right music in mind, you can gear yourself up before a fitness regimen with full determination to fulfill your goals.
2. Helps With The Final Push
Music is a form of mental coaching you would need when exercising especially when your stamina is reaching its limits. A particular kind of upbeat or uplifting melody accompanied by encouraging lyrics could be the difference between completing the last five sets of your pushups or not. While some schools of thought may argue that listening to music can deter you from reaching a state of mindfulness while exercising, many rightfully believe that music can further enhance that experience. Being aware of the physical strains while exercising while simultaneously listening to music motivation that encourages you to push further will make you more compliant to completing your exercises.
3. Provides A Good Kind Of Distraction
Unlike robots and machines, humans have physical limits and like clockwork, physical fatigue will set in after each repetition. This is an inevitable process that all of us experience when exercising, although each individual’s stamina and endurance are highly affected by their fitness level. As the demand for metabolic energy increases with each exercise intensity, the level of lactate in the muscles will elevate, your heart rate will be more rapid, and profuse perspiration ensue. When you listen to music when you exercise, the comforting external stimuli you receive will compete with the brain’s attention throughout your workouts.
4. Maintains A Steady Pace
Researchers have established that the brain activities for both music and movement are intertwined within the central nervous system. Firstly, this could be attributed to the innate relationship between our physical movements and the subsequent sounds they make. For instance, the clapping sound when we repeatedly bring our palms together or the stomping we hear when we step hard and fast on the ground. Secondly, we can attribute the relationship between your workout music and physical movements because the musical rhythm can stimulate motor responses in the brain. If you need to complete a fast and intense workout, listening to exercise songs with a faster tempo would be a fitting stimulus to induce your body’s natural rhythm response. Likewise, if you are doing yoga or pilates, music for exercise with a slower tempo would be suitable for the workout routine.
5. Regulate Your Pain Signal
As mentioned earlier, music is an art that is closely related to human emotions and is an effective accompaniment to regulate our physical responses. When you listen to a piece of particular music, you can evoke a sensation and memory that helps to release the body’s natural mood-enhancing hormones, more specifically endorphins. It is also the same chemicals that are released during a runner’s high. This feeling of euphoria can lessen the level of subjective pain or muscle soreness after an exercise. In addition, many of the neuronal pathways used to process music coincide with the ones that process pain too. In this case, if you are working out and relay your focus to the exercise songs you are listening to, your brain will pay less attention to the incoming pain signals. While listening to workout music, you are unknowingly signing yourself up for a session of music therapy that helps to manage acute exercise pain and soreness.
6. Elevate Your Mood
Listening to music can directly alter your mood before, during, and after an exercise or workout session. By listening to the music before an exercise, you can create a mental space that anticipates the physical journey you are about to endure. It is no wonder that athletes particularly in the fields of mixed martial arts and boxing have their anthem playing upon entering the arena. During a workout, listening to music can facilitate the release of the body’s ‘happy hormones’ such as dopamine and oxytocin while decreasing cortisol levels’ stress hormones. This is why exercising is a great way to achieve mindfulness. After an exercise is over, you can play a form of music motivation that celebrates your completed goal, making you feel even better and rewarded after a workout session.
7. Boosts Your Physical Performance
You may not realize this, but listening to exercise songs can help anyone to run a distance further, swim another lap away and cycle a little while longer. Music can alter the self-perception of your stamina, endurance, and pain tolerance. A study conducted in 2006 which aimed to establish the connection between the effects of music and the selection of treadmill speed revealed that participants showed increased pace and distance traveled while listening to fast-paced music. Other supporting research also arrived at a similar conclusion with the agreement that listening to music with more beats per minute can directly improve your athletic performance during a low-to-moderate level exercise. There are different suggestions as to why this phenomenon occurs, some include delayed fatigue, increased work capacity, or improved perception of an individual’s level of endurance, productivity, and strength.
8. Relieves Stress And Anxiety
Listening to calming music with a slow tempo while you exercise is a perfect supplement to your stretch or yoga classes. You can effectively enter the state of meditation with the right selection of music and therapeutic muscle movements. Certain types of music are more helpful at evoking stress relief, including Native American, Celtic, Indian stringed instruments, drums, and flutes. Other natural sounds of the elements such as rain, thunder, or insect buzzes are also beneficial at creating a calming sound especially when paired with another form of music such as light jazz or classical. According to early findings from brainwave stimulating research, slow musical beats and tempo can stimulate the production of slow brain waves that correlates to a meditative state.
9. Helps To Pass The Time
Exercising is such a rewarding experience however, time may seem to pass by as slowly as it possibly can when you are doing rather repetitive moves. There are positive impacts from exercise which you can reap almost immediately after a workout session but true physical progress may appear after a series of consistent and continuous efforts. The delay in changes in physique may make a workout session appear like a drag and slow-paced. However, if you listen to your favorite music while exercising, it can help the time pass quicker by adding a fun element to your seemingly mundane workout routine. By doing this, you can keep your mind mentally aware and active by continuously receiving an audio stimulus while your body trains to push itself beyond its limits.
10. Aids You To Focus
For most, exercising is not just physical activity, but also a form of mental challenge. Like most milestones in life, starting a journey is the hardest phase of achieving a goal. Imagine stepping into the gym and the first thing you are being welcomed to is the buzzing chatters of fellow gym-goers. While social connectivity is an excellent thing, persistent small talks and chatters can be pure distractions that slow you down from your exercise goals. By putting on your headphones and playing some exercise songs, you are essentially rekeying a body language that states you want to focus and avoid unnecessary chatters. Generally, this universal sign of a need for focus and space while enjoying music and exercise is widely understood and no one would assume that you are rude by doing so.
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