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02.03.2020

Music with 190 bpm improves your workouts

Music allows you to train more intensively, without experiencing this improved training as heavier or tiring. This is apparent from a study that Croatian and Italian researchers published in Frontiers in Psychology. The performance-enhancing effect of music manifests itself especially in endurance training, but strength athletes can benefit from it as well.

Study
The researchers got 19 female fitness enthusiasts aged 24-31 on different occasions to walk 10 minutes at a brisk pace on a treadmill or do leg presses.

The leg press work out meant that the women had to make a set of 10 reps with increasingly heavier weights. On the basis of the last completed set, the researchers calculated the weight with which the women could just make 1 rep [1RM].

Sometimes the women trained without music [NM]. Other times the women trained while listening to pop music with a tempo of 90-110 beats per minute [LOW], 130-150 beats per minute [MED] or 170-190 beats per minute [HIGH].

Results
Especially in the treadmill session, music lifted the physical performance to a higher level. When the test subjects walked on the treadmill, their heart rate rose as they listened to music. The more beats per minute, the greater the increase in heart rate.

The same was the case when the students had to make leg presses. If they listened to the music at 170-190 beats per minute, their calculated 1RM was a significant 3 kilos higher than under the other conditions.

In the table below - click on it for a readable version - you can see which differences were statistically significant and which were not.

Although music encouraged test subjects to train more intensively, music also reduced the feeling of tiredness and physical stress. The higher the tempo of the music, the stronger the effect. This was especially the case with the endurance session.

Click on the figure below for a larger version.

Conclusie
"We found that listening to high-tempo music while exercising resulted in the highest heart rate and lowest perceived exertion compared with not listening to music", tells co-author Luca Ardigo of the University of Verona in Italy in a press release. [sciencedaily.com February 2, 2020]

"This means that the exercise seemed like less effort, but it was more beneficial in terms of enhancing physical fitness."

"In the current study, we investigated the effect of music tempo in exercise, but in the future we would also like to study the effects of other music features such as genre, melody, or lyrics, on endurance and high intensity exercise", says Ardigo.

Source:
Front Psychol. 2020;11:74.

More:
You run faster on the treadmill if you watch music videos 19.06.2013
Music improves sports performance 17.06.2013

Archives:
Psychology

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