High-tempo Music Can Boost Your Workout, Study Says
Listening to your favorite songs during a workout can do more than just make it more fun, especially if those songs are high-tempo. Workout music will motivate you, improve your speed and enhance your performance. It’s a good thing that music can do all these things, especially when it is so fun to listen to it when working out. In addition, there are many studies that explain why music and exercise go hand in hand and make the greatest team ever.
“Music and a ‘good beat’ can help you keep pace and also serve as a consistent motivator to press onward, despite challenges during exercise,” explains Jennifer Townsend, M.M.T., a certified music therapist at the Houston Methodist Center for Performing Arts Medicine.
“The rhythm of your workout music indicates to the motor area of your brain when to move, thereby aiding an individual’s desire to ‘keep going.’”
Whether it’s Beyonce’s “Naughty Girl,” Taylor Swift’s “Untouchable” or Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” that puts you in a better mood and inspires you to work out harder, everyone knows that listening to music during a workout is a proven way to boost your exercise performance and duration.
The faster the music, the better your workout, right?
According to a new study published Sunday in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, high-tempo songs are the type of songs that corresponds to about 170 heartbeats per minute, and they are proven to reduce perceived effort and improves cardiovascular benefits more than lower tempos.
Researchers discovered that music can put you in a better mood before exercise, making you feel more energized, reduces the perceptions of pain, decreases the sensation of fatigue during a workout and inspires bursts of effort, improving performance and endurance.
“We found that listening to high-tempo music while exercising resulted in the highest heart rate and lowest perceived exertion compared with not listening to music,” said study author Luca Ardigò, a professor at the University of Verona in Italy, in a statement.
“This means that the exercise seemed like less effort, but it was more beneficial in terms of enhancing physical fitness.”
The greatest effects of the study were found for endurance exercises, such as running, biking, and swimming, than for high-intensity workouts like weightlifting, interval training. jumping rope or speed walking.
The results of the study coincided with the results of a study made in 2011, which found that a very fast tempo of music should be as fast as the intensity of the exercise, for example, when it comes to cycling, the tempo needs to be very fast.
In some ways, “music can be thought of as a type of legal performance-enhancing drug,” researchers say.
What should you do?
Make your own playlist based on the beats-per-minute, or BPM, of your favorite workout songs. The good news is that there are many tools on the market that help you do that. Spotify, for example, allows you to find a song’s tempo with just one click. Spotify and other music apps, allow you to access lists that include songs suitable for the type of exercise and intensity.
Here are some up-tempo choices for any musical taste:
- Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” is 171 BPM
- Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” is 173 BPM
- Beyonce’s “Naughty Girl” is 199 BPM
- Taylor Swift’s “Untouchable” is 200 BPM
And then there are songs like Moby’s “Thousand” which is only listed at 137 BPM, it, however, it holds a Guinness World Record for climbing to a whopping 1,015 BPM. If you’re not a fan of modern songs, you can try listening to Annette Funicello’s “Tall Paul” it comes in at 202 BPM, as were a number of her songs from the 1950s and 1960s.
