What Are The Benefits Of Listening To Music While Working Out? – Forbes Health

Oliver Sacks, the famous neurologist and author of Awakenings, wrote in his book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, “Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”

It’s an amazing thing to watch little kids dance without being prompted and Alzheimer’s patients soothed by music. My own grandmother could rip a mean “boogie woogie” on the piano long past when she lost track of how many grandkids she had and who was married to whom. She came alive at the piano in the retirement home.

There’s a whole cottage industry of musicians writing music for fitness brands to evoke appropriate performance for high- and low-intensity workouts, and, of course, composers and music supervisors can steer the emotional arc of films. But how does all of it actually work in the body?

It appears dopamine is the key.

According to a study in the International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychologyself-selected, motivational and stimulative music is shown to enhance affect, reduce ratings of perceived exertion, improve energy efficiency and lead to increased work output during repetitive, endurance-type activities.

In other words, if you listen to music that you enjoy while getting your heart rate up, you can achieve more with less effort. The same study shows that music is especially helpful for “self-paced exercise,” highlighting how psychological and performance benefits are magnified when you choose tunes that genuinely make you want to move. The researchers report that listening to music before you do something can put you in the right frame of mind for the task at hand as well.

What’s more, there’s evidence that sensitivity to pain can decrease in the aftermath of exercising with music, so when you’re done, you may not feel as exhausted as you would have otherwise. This effect is due to “endogenous opioids,” a natural opioid response generated by the body that regulates pain modulation, reward, responses to stress and autonomic control.