There are many people who enjoy exercising while playing music, but research has shown that the effects of music actually differ depending on exercise style.
A joint research team from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and the University of Innsbruck, Austria, conducted a meta-analysis of 10 related studies to verify whether exercising while listening to music increases exercise capacity. The analysis subjects included about 200 adults aged 18 or older who participated in the study.
As a result, it was found that it is difficult to say that music has a consistent effect on improving motor skills. This is because the effect varied depending on the age or intensity of exercise of the participants.
According to the research team, music provided significant help in improving mood and maintaining alertness for people who exercised at low or medium intensity. It served to distract attention from pain or fatigue caused by exercise. In particular, when the tempo of the music matched the exercise rhythm, the participants’ cognitive and perceptual abilities showed an increase.
However, this effect is reduced for people who enjoy high-intensity exercise or higher. The effect of dispersion of attention decreased, and the effects of improving emotions and inhibitory control also tended to weaken. According to the research team, when you do high-intensity exercise, your heart rate and breathing increase and you feel a strong sense of physical discomfort, but this physiological burden reduces the cognitive freedom to listen to music, making it less effective.
This study also showed that the effect of music decreased as the participants got older, which was also analyzed to be due to differences in cognitive function. The research team explains that as cognitive processing speed decreases due to aging, response to music may decrease accordingly.
The research team explained, “The exercise improvement effect through music was most evident during low-intensity exercise,” and “It was found that up to 3.7 times the exercise improvement effect can be expected when performing low-intensity exercise compared to high-intensity exercise.”
He added, “Although the number of samples reviewed in this study is too small to draw definitive conclusions, the effect of music on exercise varies greatly from person to person, so it is difficult to see a consistent effect.”
The results of this study were recently published in Frontiers in Psychology, an international journal in the field of psychology.
