Making music during workouts greatly reduces the perceived exertion, a study by researchers from Germany and Belgium has found. Simply listening to pre-recorded music does not have the same effect. The research team, headed by Thomas Hans Fritz, a neurologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, hooked up three types of exercise machines - a stepper, a tower and a stomach trainer - to a computer.
It produced electronic music that was modulated by non-athlete volunteers' level of physical exertion.
"We were able to demonstrate several effects on the test persons," Fritz told dpa.
Volunteers who made music themselves during workouts - a process that Fritz calls "jymmin'," a cross between "jammin'" and "gym" - reported feeling less tired and believed they had exerted less energy than did those that merely listened to a standard music track and stuck to a rigid routine, he said.
They also used their muscles more effectively because, as the research team conjectured, the heightened emotionality of the music makers reduced the activity of antagonistic muscles, that is muscles that oppose the action of other muscles.
"They were able to accomplish more with less oxygen," Fritz said. The positive effects appeared after just a few minutes of exercise, during which large amounts of "happiness hormones" were released.
The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, "crucially help to understand the therapeutic power of music, a scientific field about to unfold," the authors of the study wrote.
What is more, the reduced perception of exertion during strenuous physical activity accompanied by music making "may be a previously unacknowledged driving force for the development of music in humans."
Fritz's previous research has focused in part on "musical ecstasy" and included the music of the Mafa people of northern Cameroon, who strike up ritualistic songs during strenuous field work.
A better understanding of how music's positive effects are achieved, he said, could further new approaches in rehabilitative music therapy.
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