Boosting Your Exercise Routine

Forget the shuffle button when you exercise — deliberately bring out all the ladies like Lady Gaga, Beyonce and Rihanna.

Sitting stationary on a bike for an hour is extremely unexciting and monotonous. Getting pumped for the gym is already hard to do and when you’re there, getting into the exercise is just as difficult. However, listening to music can make what seems like a chore that much more tolerable. Music can also boost your exercise performance, making you work out even harder.

Jim Waterhouse and his colleagues at Liverpool John Moores University conducted a study that will appear later this year in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports. In the study, they secretly sped up or slowed down music by 10% and observed the effect on the subjects riding exercise bikes. Sure enough, the riders unconsciously sped up or slowed down.

The theory says it’s all about distractions. When you listen to music, you focus on the sounds and you’re less aware of the distress signals your muscles are sending you. I know from personal experience when a fast-beat song comes on, I really get into my workout. I’m Speedy Gonzales when I’m on the exercise bike and listening to “Livin’ on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi.

In the study, the British researchers also controlled factors like personal preferences, volume, pitch, duration, genre and lyrics. They chose six tracks that were popular among the undergraduate students and combined them into a single 25-minute program, digitally altering them to create faster and slower versions without changing the pitch. 

The subjects exercised to three versions of the playlist with a week in between each session, and none of them noticed the differences in tempo. What’s really cool, though, is that with the faster music, the subjects weren’t distracted from their discomfort, but were motivated to happily endure greater levels of discomfort. Neat, huh?!

However, playing the wrong music — like slower tempos, in this case — can slow your workout down, so don’t just hit shuffle next time at the gym.

So, the real question is — what’s on your playlist?

— By Sarah DiVito