Does Music Help Us Exercise?

You might know that music plays a major role in our daily activity, especially on our exercise. And we can see that just like silence doesn’t help us to be more creative or better drivers, it’s not much use when we’re exercising, either.

Research on the effects of music during exercise has been done for years. In 1911, an American researcher, Leonard Ayres, found that cyclist’s speed become faster while listening to music than they did in silence.

This happens because listening to music can drown out our brain’s cries of fatigue. When our body realizes we’re tired it wants us to stop exercising immediately, it sends signals to the brain to stop for a break. Listening to music might diffuse our mind’s attention of tired feeling, and can help us to override those signals of fatigue, though this is mostly beneficial for low- and moderate-intensity exercise. During high-intensity exercise, music isn’t as powerful at pulling our brain’s attention away from the pain of the workout.

Music not only can help us push through the pain to exercise longer and harder, but it can also help us to use our energy more efficiently. A study in 2012 showed that cyclists who listened to music required 7% less oxygen to do the same work as those who cycled in silence.

Some recent research has shown that there’s a ceiling effect on music at around 145 bpm, where anything higher doesn’t seem to add much motivation, so keep that in mind when choosing your workout playlist. Here is how this breaks down for different genres:

Now if we team up these different “tempos” with the actual workout we’re doing, we can be in much better sync and find the right beat for our exercise. If you match up the above with the graphic below it should be super easy to get into a good groove:

Listening music naturally brings a lot of benefit to our health, work and exercise. However, how to take all advantage of music still need a lot of another research to figure out. But, the sure thing that you can realize from this recommendation is that music is relatively good for exercise process. If you do not believe, you can experience by yourself to find down the trust. And don’t remember to download music from YouTube to MP3 converter to get the quality source of music.

So in the same way that exercising makes us happier, it’s not surprising that music adds significantly to our workout success.