Music Makes Exercise More Effective
Music is part of any culture. This is why music gadgets have been popular for ages. Bringing music to a jog or having it during workout sessions have always been a common sight. But did you know that music has more to offer than just be your background music during your exercise?
Music Lessens Fatigue During Exercise
CC by Ed Yourdon, flickr.com/photos/yourdon/
Here are some interesting facts about music and how it maximizes the effectiveness of your workouts.
Exercise Benefits Increase With Music
1. Music increases a person’s efficiency for a workout.
It is found out that music helps distract the person working out from the difficulty of the exercises that he is undertaking, enhancing his performance.
In a study made by Brunel University’s sports psychologist, Costas Karageorghis, it has shown that music reduces a person’s perception of the effort that he is exerting by 10%. This means that the person exercising can complete every exercise and may even be able to do more because his focus is not on how hard the exercises are but on the music.
2. Music helps improve endurance.
In the same study, it was shown that with music, there is a 15% improvement in a person’s endurance of the workouts. The heart beat and the cadence of the person doing the exercise synchronizes with the rhythm of the music. .
3. Music helps increase or decrease the effort put into the workout.
It is found out that an increase in the rhythm of the music also increases the distance covered by runners and cyclists. Songs with quicker beats can lead a person to increasing his pace and go for longer distances.
Here’s an article on Lifehacker Australia about the effects of music on exercise:
Music’s Effect On Exercise
Music distracts people from pain and fatigue, elevates mood, increases endurance, reduces perceived effort and may even promote metabolic efficiency. When listening to music, people run farther, bike longer and swim faster than usual — often without realising it. In a 2012 review of the research, Costas Karageorghis of Brunel University in London, one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of exercise music, wrote that one could think of music as “a type of legal performance-enhancing drug”.
The physical effects of music on exercise are not the only benefits we can get out of the combination of the two. As studies and researches have been telling us for years, separately, both have positive effects on the functions of the brain.
Literature on how exercise helps promote cognitive and other brain functions are all over the internet, and for years, parents and educators have been using music to enhance the learning of their little ones; however, combining both a specific effect on the brain.
For the brain to absorb and interpret music, it must first lay out separately the elements that make it all up: Tone, Timing, Sound and Sequencing. So, while the physical already stimulates the brain to increase its cognitive function because of the exercise itself, the music enhances its mental agility and levels up its mental function for abstract thinking, logic and analysis.
The study on the effects of music and exercise to the brain was done specifically with classical music, but according to Ohio State University clinical psychologist, Charles Emery, any music is certain to generate the same level of effect.
Exercise is definitely beneficial to people, whichever way you look at it. It will help you improve on your performance in the things that you are involved in such as your work, and most especially, the quality of time you devote to your family. Sign up with our Sydney bootcamps and go for a healthier and more productive lifestyle.
