How to Know If Music Will Help or Hurt Your Workout
Music can enhance your workout by distracting you from pain and fatigue, but it is not a gift for every workout. Depending on your personality and sport, you might be better off not getting distracted.
Elite runner Adharanand Finn writes for the Guardian about the impact of music on the rock and roll half marathon. He doesn’t think the music helped, but many other members liked it. Sports psychologist Kostas Karageorgis explains:
“Elite athletes,” Karageorgis says, “are usually ‘helpers’, which means they tend to focus internally while running.” Most other runners, he says, are “dissociators” (or somewhere in between). This means that they are looking for stimuli and distracting from what is happening around them.
Distracting attention, including from the music, is great for dissociators, but can prevent partners from performing their best. (It may be that dissociators need to acquire an associative personality or strategy as they develop, but that’s a topic for another time.) So, for amateur runners, music tends to help more than it hurts.
The sport can make a difference, too. Music works well for sports like running and cycling where your main job is to adjust the pace: if the music makes you pedal faster, that’s all you need for better performance. On the other hand, music can distract too much from more challenging sports. There isn’t a lot of research on this idea, but one study from the Swiss Crossfit gym supports it. There, the participants did a synchronized Cindy workout that included pull-ups, push-ups, and squats. The researchers were surprised to find that CrossFitters were able to score more reps when they worked in silence than when they skated to a playlist of AC / DC tunes (a favorite in this gym especially).
Why didn’t the music help? Perhaps because exercise required more attention to correct form than running; and perhaps because the participants needed to accurately gauge their level of fatigue in order to see if they could push themselves one more or maybe two reps. In this case, if music distracts you from fatigue, it may be more a minus than a plus.
Does music help you run faster? | The keeper
Photo by Kai Chan Wong .
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