When Kelly Holmes won her double Olympic gold last year, it was with the help of a little secret that she hasn’t let on to too many. Music. More specifically the song
Red Light, by Linda Clifford. Every day when she was circuit training in preparation for the Olympics, she would have the single, which is from the soundtrack of
Fame, playing on her personal stereo. The upbeat tempo helped to keep her going.
Listening to Elvis in the gym helped to motivate the England cricketer Freddie Flintoff and when the British tennis player Andrew Murray walked out on court at the start of each match at Wimbledon this year, observant spectators may have noticed that he was plugged into his iPod. The sounds he was listening to, to fire himself up, included Let’s Get It Started, by Black Eyed Peas.
Anyone who exercises while listening to a Walkman or iPod will know that music makes working out seem easier. But now a number of studies carried out in the UK and United States have proved that music is a more powerful motivator than any personal trainer or coach. It can make you exercise harder, burn calories faster and it is also helping athletes to win competitions. “It’s astonishing the difference music makes,” says Dr Jimmy Smith, a sports psychologist at Southwestern University, in Texas, and responsible for one of the leading studies into the phenomenon. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s Kylie Minogue, country and western or Mozart. The key issue is that it has to be music that the exerciser loves.”
Dr Smith tested a group of 15 students four times on exercise bicycles, asking each of them to cycle until they were exhausted. First they pedalled with no music, then to slow-paced tracks, to fast-paced tracks and, finally, to the music of their choice. Every one of them cycled further, and at a higher intensity, with the music of their choice. “That shocked us,” says Dr Smith. “It proved that the music’s tempo was irrelevant. There have been a number of studies that have shown that music can help exercisers to work out for longer periods. I wanted to find out which types work best.”
Yet, while music can motivate it can also demotivate, according to Dr Costas Karageorghis, a senior lecturer in sport psychology at Brunel University. He has been researching the psychological and physical effects that music has on exercise and sports performance for more than 12 years. “If it doesn’t stem from your socio-cultural background, or if it’s music that doesn’t have any personal meaning, it can reduce your level of motivation. In the same way that you have a negative association with a song, say, that was playing when you were dumped by your partner, it can have a demotivating effect owing to the impact that it has on your emotions.”
Human beings are hard-wired to process music on both a motor and an emotional level, says Mark Bodner, the director of research for the Mind Institute, a brain research facility in California. “Music seems to be a kind of prelanguage that we are born with. It taps into something within us that is truly innate. We all have our own subjective experience with rhythm and melody.”
When we are exercising, music also helps us to disassociate ourselves from the pain of pushing ourselves hard, according to Renee Murphy, a professor in exercise science at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, who has also conducted a study into music and exercise.
“Our research leads us to believe that if people are listening to music while they exercise, they are not feeling the soreness, or the fatigue, or the heavy breathing or the pounding heart. All these things become secondary to the enjoyment of the music. Interestingly enough though, we found that women responded better to music than men. We tested a mixed group on a treadmill by playing randomly selected music. Overall, it was the women who ran further and faster.”
Ironically, Dr Smith believes that the right music can help to cut down the amount of time that exercisers spend at the gym. “If you want to burn calories, you either exercise longer at a slower pace, or you can exercise more intensely for less time. Music can help individuals to exercise more intensely, so if you’re in a time-crunch, listening to the music you love is going to get you out of the gym quicker.”
So vital are the grooves to move to that the music played in gyms is now a make-or-break issue among the hip and hard-to-please fitness fanatics in the US. There are DJs performing live at an increasing number of gyms in New York and Los Angeles, and at Ballys, one of the biggest gym chains in the country, the music is changed depending on the time of day and the crowd.
The young professional 5am-8am crowd, for example, get high energy, hip-hop and breakbeat music, while the older clients who turn up in the afternoon will get the golden oldies.
Along with the gym rats, athletes are increasingly using music to prepare for com- petitions. “They use music to get psyched up and pumped up,” says Dr Patrick Cohn, a sports psychologist who makes personal audiotapes for those he coaches at his Peak Performance Sports School in Orlando, Florida. “When athletes put on their headphones, they start to tune in, to focus and to put on what is called their game face. Some athletes need to be calmed down, and some need to be pumped up before a big competition,” he says. “We’ve found that music helps them get into the zone where they feel positive, focused and motivated. We live in an age where everyone is looking for an edge. Music gives that edge and helps them to win.”
But a word of warning before you jump on to the treadmill and turn up the volume of your favourite track. Research by Frederick d’Alessio and Eric Hutchinson at Miami University in 1991 suggested that if you combine high intensity exercise with music at a high volume, beyond 85 decibels — the noise equivalent of a food mixer in action — it can lead to temporary hearing loss.
“There is an interaction effect that seems to occur between high intensity exercise and high volume music,” says Dr Karageorghis. “Initially it is a short-term effect, but repeated exposure to high volume music, combined with high intensity exercise, can lead to a permanent effect.”
So if you are after big beats, make sure that they come only from the heart.
