Wellness experts and fitness enthusiasts alike know how beneficial music is when you workout; having an MP3 player with you on a long run can help distract you or motivate you to keep going, but according to a new study it’s not just listening to music, but making music yourself that can make exercising a whole lot easier. The research, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, even goes so far as to suggest that our love for music may have evolved, in part, to ease physical effort.
While researchers have long-known that listening to music is beneficial to your workouts, as well as your overall wellbeing, up until now no one has even thought to investigate whether creating — and not merely hearing — music might have an effect on your performance, or indeed whether this impact might be even better than just merely hearing the sounds through the gym speakers or your headphones. Therefore, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognition and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and other institutions invented an electronic kit that could be integrated into the internal workings of weight-training machines, transforming them into oversize boom boxes.
The kit, depending on how you manipulate the machine’s weight bar or other mechanisms, produced a range of propulsive, electronic-style music with a variety of sound levels and rhythms. This was installed in a stair-stepper machine as well as two weight machines with bars that could be raised or pulled down to stimulate various muscles. For the study, 63 healthy men and women were divided into groups, each being assigned to use one of the musically equipped machines during a strenuous six-minute exercise session. The sound level rose and fell with each individual’s effort, and twinned with the rhythms created by the other two exercisers. According to study leader Thomas Hans Fritz, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute, ‘Participants could express themselves on the machines by, for instance, modulating rhythms and creating melodies.’ Basically, the exercisers were the DJs for their own workouts.
The volunteers then took part in a separate exercise session, using the same machines minus the musical add-ons. However, elsewhere, another group used the musically-equipped machines, which meant that one group was passively listening to sounds created by another. The results of the study revealed that working at the musically-equipped machines – rather than the unmodified ones – caused most of the volunteers to generate significantly greater muscular force, use less oxygen to generate that force and report that their exertions had felt less strenuous. Their movements were also more smooth in general, which resulted in a steadier flow of music.
Dr. Fritz explained that creating their own rhythms and melodies made exercising more subjectively alluring to participants than if they just passively listened to the same music. Moreover, making the music helped participants to lower the physiological cost of exercise. Dr. Fritz pointed out that, in a similar way, early humans may have been motivated to whistle or hum while they hunted, and later to raise their voices in song during barn raisings and other intense physical labour. Still, the exact reason as to why orchestrating your own beats has more physical benefit than simply hearing the same song is not clear. Dr. Fritz noted, ‘We think that the observed effects are most probably due to a greater degree of emotional motor control.’ So what does that mean for you? Dr. Fritz advised ignoring the music in the gym, and instead humming to yourself or harmonising – however badly – with your workout partner. That way, he said, you’ll be ‘jymming; that’s like jamming, but with a “y” from “gym.”’
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