Music and exercise - the brain's 'boogie down' phenomenon.

What music do you have on your workout playlist? Upbeat techno? Ear splitting rap music? Or is it head banging metal? No matter what you listen to while churning out miles on the treadmill, research shows that it’s more crucial to exercise than you may think.

In fact, music works in interesting ways to boost physical performance, giving you a better workout once armed with your iPod shuffle and earbuds.  Studies reveal that music actually serves as a distraction from the neurological signals of fatigue our brain emits during a workout, with our bodies are soon to follow. That distracting or conflicting positive signal from listen to music allows us to work through pain and fatigue, elevates our mood, increases our endurance, and actually promotes metabolic efficiency. It’s not just in your head – you can actually run farther and lift more and work out longer and harder with less perceived effort with music playing.

The body of research endorsing music’s role in exercise actually extends back to 1911, when American scientist Leonard Ayres found that professional cyclists actually pedaled faster when a band was playing than when it was silent.  

But the main body of research into music’s effect on exercise has come in the last twenty years.  A study in 2012 backed up Ayre’s century-old findings – that cyclists who listened to music used 7% less oxygen to muster the same performance as cyclists who rode without it. Costas Karageorghis, a researcher at the Brunel University of London and world-renowned authority on the psychology of exercise in music, concluded that same year that music during workouts was tantamount to, “A type of legal performance-enhancing drug.” Indeed, several current studies prove that listening to music increases electrical activity in certain regions of the brain that coordinate movement – the supplementary motor area, cerebellum, basal ganglia and ventral premotor cortex for you brainiacs keeping score at home.

Now that we’ve justified our purchase of unlimited music to aid our health and fitness journey, does it matter what kind of music you listen to? Absolutely. In fact, the rhythmic speed of your music also plays into an increase in athletic performance.  Interestingly enough, human beings most respond to a cadence of 2 hertz, or 120 beats per minute (BPM.)  When human beings clap in a group or tap their fingers on a table, they tend to settle in to that BPM naturally. They gather that 2 BPM is closest to the natural rhythm of the human heart at rest. When researchers tracked the BPM of all music from 1960 until present day, the majority of songs have 120 BPM.

So that is the baseline (no pun intended) of where music starts enhancing physical performance. Any slower than that and there probably won’t be a boost of mood, perception of exertion, endurance, or moto-neurons. As we get up to the 140 BPM range we probably hit the optimal range for music during a workout, though people on a treadmill tend to favor faster music, around 160 BPM. But for the rest of us lifting weights or performing other cardio, 145 BPM seems to be the ceiling for optimal performance – after that, there is little added benefit.  

There is a second phenomenon when it comes to music’s role in boosting exercise, something that white-coated scientists call “rhythm response.” Quite simply, that’s a person’s emotional connection to a song based on unique memories that triggers the human “neural crosstalk” response. Quite simply, certain music tells our brain to get down and dance, boogying like our pants were on fire!

 So turn up the music and have a kick ass workout!