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MyMusic: Using Music to Enhance and Improve Your Workout

Music activates a wide range of brain regions, including those associated with emotion and autonomic responses.

Here is what listening to music does for your workout:

• It reduces your perception of how hard you are working by about 10% during low to moderate intensity activity. During high-intensity activity, music doesn’t work as well because your brain starts screaming at you to pay attention to physiological stress signals.
• Music can have a profound influence on mood, potentially elevating the positive aspects of mood, such as vigor, excitement and happiness and reducing depression, tension, fatigue, anger and confusion.
• Music can be used to set your pace.
• Looking for a sure-fire way to raise your sports performance? Study after study confirms the effects of music on attitude and behavior. Certain music strikes certain chords within us, changing our inner vibrations – making us sharp when we’re flat.

The link between music and athletic performance is just one example of the inroads scientists and doctors are making into understanding the amazing power that music has over our minds and bodies. Science is backing up our intuition and experience, showing that music really does kill pain, reduce stress, better our brains and basically change how we experience life.