Move to the Beat: How Music Improves Exercise
There's nothing like listening to music while you exercise. It helps you stay motivated, and somehow even makes your workout feel easier.
And it's not just a feeling — music has been called "a type of legal performance-enhancing drug," and a lot of research has been done into the ways it helps you exercise.
A 2020 review of nearly 140 studies found that listening to music really does make you feel happier while exercising. It also improves performance, makes your body feel like it isn't working as hard, and even improves how efficiently your body uses oxygen.
It's been suggested that listening to music also distracts from the pain you start to feel while exercising, because it's harder for you to focus on two things at once.
Costas Karageorghis (kara-JOR-jiss), a professor at Brunel University London and one of the authors of the 2020 review, says the distraction effect works best for low- to moderate-intensity exercise.
For more intense exercise, music still helps, but it no longer distracts — instead, it motivates you to keep going.
There's even an ideal tempo for motivating music — between 120 and 140 beats per minute. That would be between Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" and Michael Jackson's "Beat It."
Karageorghis says 120 beats per minute would be good for low-intensity exercise like walking, while 140 would be better for something like running.
He also says synchronizing your movements to music has been found to improve performance.
However, if you're a fast runner taking as many as 180 steps every minute, he recommends music at half the tempo of your movements, because it's very hard to keep time with music that's faster than 150 beats per minute.
But all of this only works if you're listening to music you like. Christopher Ballmann from the University of Alabama at Birmingham says his research has found that if you don't like the music being played while you exercise, you actually perform worse!
