Why listening to music can make athletes run a bit faster
What is it about music that makes most athletes run faster? We pursue the latest research
It's no secret that music is like a performance-enhancing drug for runners. But while fast-tempo songs that match one's pace are often thought of as the most effective, a new study has found that it's not only the beat that counts.
How a song motivates an individual is more important, according to research by Brunel University published last month in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.
Music strikes a chord with people in different ways: through melody, tempo, lyrics and even by triggering a feeling or memory.
"The general meaning of music apparently overcomes the acoustic properties of the song; in other words, people seem to feel music as a sum of its parts, regardless of tempo," says lead researcher Marcelo Bigliassi, a PhD student at Brunel.
"It is impossible to say that a certain excerpt of music is motivational because of the tempo or tune," he says. "There is a big interaction between different components such as lyrics, tempo and melody, and the sum of all these creates the motivational content of music."
Over 30 weeks, Bigliassi and colleagues put 15 well-trained amateur male runners through a series of all-out 5km tests around a 400-metre track.