If you have been training for a long time, you might have had days which you just wanted to listen to some new hit that just came out to get hyped up and train like a beast and also days which you either did not feel the vibe to listen to music or just wanted to stay focused on what you do. Of course each of them have their own pros and cons and like every training system or diet regiment, their own time and place. Kianabolik has gathered the most important claims about this subject in this article from both music enthusiasts and also mute mode lovers and compared them to scientific researches.
what are the advantages of listening to music while training?
Research consistently finds that listening to music distracts athletes from their “bodily awareness” .
For a study published last year, British researchers asked 12 healthy male college students to ride stationary bicycles while listening to music that, as the researchers primly wrote, “reflected current popular taste among the undergraduate population.” Each of the six songs chosen differed somewhat in tempo from the others.
The volunteers were told to ride the bicycles at a pace that they comfortably could maintain for 30 minutes. Then each rode in three separate trials, wearing headphones tuned to their preferred volume. Each had his heart rate, power output, pedal cadence, enjoyment of the music and feelings of how hard the riding felt monitored throughout each session. During one of the rides, the six songs ran at their normal tempos. During the other rides, the tempo of the tracks was slowed by 10 percent or increased by 10 percent. The riders were not informed about the tempo manipulations.
But their riding changed significantly in response. When the tempo slowed, so did their pedaling and their entire affect. Their heart rates fell. Their mileage dropped. They reported that they didn’t like the music much. On the other hand, when the tempo of the songs was upped 10 percent, the men covered more miles in the same period of time, produced more power with each pedal stroke and increased their pedal cadences. Their heart rates rose. They reported enjoying the music — the same music — about 36 percent more than when it was slowed. But, paradoxically, they did not find the workout easier. Their sense of how hard they were working rose 2.4 percent. The up-tempo music didn’t mask the discomfort of the exercise. But it seemed to motivate them to push themselves. As the researchers wrote, when “the music was played faster, the participants chose to accept, and even prefer, a greater degree of effort.”
Just how music impacts the body during exercise, however, is only slowly being teased out by scientists. One study published on 2009 found that basketball players prone to performing poorly under pressure during games were significantly better during high-pressure free-throw shooting if they first listened to catchy, upbeat music and lyrics (in this case, the Monty Python classic “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”). The music seemed to distract the players from themselves, from their audience and from thinking about the physical process of shooting, said Christopher Mesagno, a lecturer at the University of Ballarat in Victoria, Australia, and the study’s lead author. It freed the body to do what it knew how to do without interference from the brain. “The music was occupying attention that might have been misdirected otherwise,” Mr. Mesagno said.
. And a recent study found that not just listening, but controlling and creating music in time to one’s pace had an even more profound effect on perceived effort during a workout.
While the study did suggest there’s more to it than distraction, working out with music did make participants less aware of their exertion. Such a distraction can benefit athletic performance by up to 15 percent, The Guardian reported. The faster the better, according to WebMD: Upbeat tunes have more information for our brains to process, which takes your mind off of that side stitch.
According to a 2007 study from the Stanford University School of Medicine, music — classical music, specifically — can help your brain absorb and interpret new information more easily.
Your brain processes the abundance of information it receives from the world around you by separating it into smaller segments.
The researchers found evidence to suggest that music can engage your brain in such a way that it trains it to pay better attention to events and make predictions about what might happen.
How does this help you study? Well, if you struggle to make sense of new material, listening to music could make this process easier.
You can also link the ability to make better predictions about events to reasoning skills.
Improved reasoning abilities won’t help you pull answers out of thin air come exam time. But you could notice a difference in your ability to reason your way to these answers based on the information you do have.
Other research also supports music as a possible method of improving focus.
In a 2011 study of 41 boys diagnosed with ADHD, background music distracted some of the boys, but it appeared to lead to better performance in the classroom for others.
An article published on july, 2011 suggests that Like any sound, music arrives at the ear in the form of sound waves. The external ear collects sound waves, and the ear canal funnels them to the eardrum. As the waves strike the eardrum, they cause it to vibrate. The vibrations are relayed along the chain of tiny bones in the middle ear until they reach the third bone, the stapes, which connects to the cochlea.
The cochlea is a busy little world of its own. It is filled with fluid that surrounds some 10,000 to 15,000 tiny hair cells, or cilia. Vibrations of the stapes send fluid waves through the spiral-shaped cochlea. The fluid waves produce swaying movements of the hair cells. In turn, these cells release chemical neurotransmitters that activate the auditory nerve, sending miniature electric currents to the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe of the brain.
From there, things get even more complicated. Studies using MRI and positron emission tomography (PET) scans suggest that nerve networks in different parts of the brain bear primary responsibility for decoding and interpreting various properties of music. For example, a small area in the right temporal lobe is essential to perceive pitch, which forms the basis of melody (patterns of pitch over time), chords (several pitches that sound at the same time), and harmony (two or more melodies at the same time). Another nearby center is responsible for decoding timbre, the quality that allows the brain to distinguish between different instruments that are playing the same note. A different part of the brain, the cerebellum, processes rhythm, and the frontal lobes interpret the emotional content of music. And music that’s powerful enough to be “spine-tingling” can light up the brain’s “reward center,” much like pleasurable stimuli ranging from alcohol to chocolate.
Although every healthy human brain can perform all the complex tasks needed to perceive music, musicians’ brains are, so to speak, more finely attuned to these tasks. At the other end of the spectrum, patients with brain damage may display remarkable defects in musicality; the noted neurologist and writer Dr. Oliver Sacks discusses many fascinating varieties of amusia in his book Musicophilia.
Researchers in a study in canada 2012 found that when music possesses “high-groove” qualities, the brain gets excited and induces movement in the listener. Basically, your playlist has the ability to make you move — no matter how much you’re dreading that workout.
what are the disadvantages of listening to music while training?
If you often train with music, or podcasts, or while watching television on the treadmill, you might want to listen up—literally. New research supports the idea that auditory and visual distractions while training may raise your risk for injuries.
The findings aren’t terribly surprising. It makes sense that the more things we have on our minds while working out, the less careful we may be about our form, biomechanics, obstacles in the way, or how hard we’re really working. But this may be one of the first times researchers have compared distracted versus non-distracted running in a lab setting, and really quantified the results.
To test their hypothesis that distractions could interfere with safety, researchers from the University of Florida asked 14 experienced runners to run on a treadmill three separate times—once while watching a screen that flashed different letters and colors; once while listening to words spoken by different voices; and once with no background images or noise. For both distraction scenarios, they were asked to pay attention and identify certain letter-color or word-voice combinations.
The researchers noted that when the runners concentrated on those distractions, they applied force to their legs at a faster rate, compared to when they had a single focus. They also tended to breathe heavier and have higher heart rates while distracted. During the listening scenario, they also experienced an increased amount of force from the ground—meaning they came down harder with each foot fall.
There’s a reason your yoga instructor constantly wants you to hum “om” during your class: It helps you breathe properly, and breathing is key when you’re working out.
The more intense our workouts get, the more oxygen our bodies need. However, how many of us start holding our breath to ease the pain in our abs halfway through a two-minute plank? Most of us.
When we’re tired but still have part of our workouts left, a lot of us start to let go of our breathing first because it seems so minor. Doing that actually makes your body fatigue faster, though, holding you back from working out to your full potential.
When I stopped relying on Eminem(who does not seem to breathe in his songs either!!) to get me through my workouts, I started consciously applying the breathing I learned in yoga and other fitness classes to my training. By listening to my breathing, I am better able to focus on getting the technique right for my entire session.
My body doesn’t run out of steam nearly as fast as it used to because the proper amount of oxygen is always going in and out. As a result, I can run for a longer period of time.
The neurobiology of music is a highly specialized field. But music also has major effects on many aspects of health, ranging from memory and mood to cardiovascular function and athletic performance.
If you have any rhythm at all — which, to be fair, not all of us do — it can be really difficult not to match your pace to the beat of a song.
As someone who took volleyball for most of his life, it’s almost impossible for me to ignore my instinct to keep with the music. The problem is that meant when a slower song came on, I slowed down my running pace, too. As a result, I’d unintentionally hold myself back from working out as hard as I could.
But when I turned the music off, my pace was solely based on my energy level, meaning I ran at the fastest pace I could at all times without tech n9ne having any say.
Having French Montana repeatedly order you to “pop that” isn’t exactly conducive to thinking. In fact, it makes it pretty much impossible. Running is supposed to help you clear your head, but the music we typically work out to prevents us from doing that.
Once I stopped running to music, I started using that time to let my mind wander. Thinking whatever thoughts pop into my head allows me to zone out the real world for an hour and distracts me from looking at the clock.
The first time I finished running without music, I realized I ran farther than I had in weeks, and my mind felt less clouded with those stressful thoughts about work, bills, student loans and all the things I needed to do.
source:
nih.gov,webmd.com,nytimes.com,elitedaily.com,bestfitmagazine.co.uk,healthline.com,bodybuilding.com,sciencedirect.com,health.com,active.com