This is part two of three of a small series on music and riding. Here’s Part One, in case you missed it.
My own, highly subjective and anecdotal, experience is that music definitely helps me train. But I was interested to know what the science behind this might be, partly triggered by an excellent article from elite UK ‘cross racer Claire Beaumont, whose blog in general is worth a read. I’m going to try and summarise what’s out there on the web on this subject, mixed in with my own views.
There are a number of different ways that music could potentially help cyclists. Some of these are just common sense; others might be subject to a bit more scientific analysis.
- Relieve boredom
- Act as motivation
- Distract from pain
- Increase performance
The first three seem intuitively to work, although I suspect the effects are highly personal; the fourth is where most of the questions lie. Let’s have a look at each in turn.
1. Relieve boredom
Most of the time riding a bike is fun. But not always, and especially indoors. Show me someone who claims never once to be a bit bored on a five-hour ride on familiar roads on a grey day in December and I will show you a liar. If you like listening to music, having the option of listening to something while you ride can only be a good thing.
2. Act as motivation
Whether you describe it as inspiration or motivation, it seems possible that music can help gee you up, get you going; however you want to describe it.
For example, there are a couple of tunes that have over time become capable of pepping me up fairly reliably. AC DC’s Highway to Hell will always be associated with the feeling of sitting on the start line at the Transalp and then buzzing through pretty Alpine start towns in a pack of excited racers. So whenever I listen to it, I get a bit of that feeling. Or Guns and Roses’ Paradise City – I’ve listened to that so many times while doing intervals on the turbo that it has a certain association with going hard.
And I challenge anyone who isn’t totally tone-deaf to listen to Handel’s Zadok the Priest at high volume, or the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore and not feel at least somewhat uplifted.
However, it’s fairly obvious that whether music can work as motivation depends on personal taste. If you can find some music that for you personally works as a motivational aid, then great. Some people might be able to find loads of music that fits the bill, whereas for others it probably won’t work at all.
3. Distract from pain
A friend of mine does his turbo intervals in silence, staring at his garage wall. I marvel at this – the turbo is boring and painful enough without this added sensory deprivation.
Others will say that this approach is necessary in order to train the mind as well as the body. If you can’t make yourself go hard and inflict pain on yourself just through the power of your own mental focus, then how can you expect to race effectively?
I would argue it slightly differently. I don’t necessarily expect to as mentally ‘on it’ during a training block in December as I do at a race in July. However, I do want to train hard. There will be times, inevitably as a non-professional athlete who has to work for a living, when I’m a bit tired, or a bit de-motivated or lacking the absolute best focus, or generally life has got in the way. And if at those times, music can help me get through that one extra interval, or keep pushing out an extra 5W, then that all adds to the aggregate training effect I can achieve.
4. Increase performance
I guess by ‘increase performance’ I mean increase output for the same perceived exertion. If music could actually increase output for the same physiological input, that would be something pretty impressive, and I think we would all have heard about it by now.
The pre-eminent sports scientist (or at least the noisiest one) seems to be a Dr. Costas Karageorghis, of various places including the US Sports Academy. If you want to get into the full details, have a look at http://www.thesportjournal.org/article/music-sport-and-exercise-theory-and-practice, which is interesting, if a bit full of sports science jargon. It contains references to various relationships between sports performance and music, some of which I’ve included under headings 1 to 3 above.
In a lot of words, it seems to say the following:
– You need to like the music, and it should be energetic in style
– The music needs to be varied
– It might help if it’s linked in your mind with athletic performance in some way (e.g. “Eye of the Tiger”)
One of the most interesting parts of the article, though, relates to the relationship between music and the state of ‘flow’. There’s a slight risk of mumbo-jumbo here, but it seems to suggest that music can help athletes (or at least “aerobic dance participants”, in the study – the mind boggles) to get ‘in the zone’.
In http://clearinghouse.missouriwestern.edu/manuscripts/541.php, it seems to have been quite easy to manipulate participants’ response to music by priming them to expect certain reactions beforehand. I.e. if people are told that music improves their performance, then that is what it will do; but the reverse is also true. That suggests that there is nothing inherent in music that will help performance; but also that the brain uses various tricks to make the body undergo hard athletic activities, and given the right messages it can use music as one of those.
What is the ‘best’ kind of music to listen to?
Based on what I’ve read, the answer to this seems to be: whatever you like, because music is personal. That’s probably not a great surprise.
But beyond that it appears that music that is synchronous with the sporting activity in question can be helpful, just because it provides an added rhythm.
In cycling, that raises an interesting problem. If a typical cycling cadence is around 90-100 rpm, accompanying music ought to be at either a similar bpm or at double that. Dance music of various kinds is probably a good candidate in principle for helpful training music. But house music tends to be in the range of 120-130bpm. 100bpm can feel soporifically slow – not a useful effect. You have to get into some fairly extreme forms of drum n bass before you find bpms of 180. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabber_music or “speedcore”, anyone? No, I didn’t think so.
I tend to find that music that is close to being synchronous but not quite there can actually be quite distracting. If you’re trying to maintain 100rpm but the music is at 95bpm, the natural tendency, if you’ve got any kind of sense of rhythm, is to reduce the rpm to match. That doesn’t happen if the gap is bigger, as the pedalling action feels laboured or frantic if it’s very different from the natural level.
The Karageorghis article cited above also seems to suggest that synchonicity with heart rate is also useful. Personally I don’t really buy that, and there didn’t seem to be much (any) evidence to support this claim.
Conclusion
My conclusion from having done a bit of reading of the science is not that different from what I imagined based on my own experience; and it’s pretty intuitive. If you like music, it might well help with training, either by motivating or distracting. This effect is probably highly psychosomatic – if you believe that music helps, it probably will. And particularly if the bpm is very close to the desired rpm, it might be helpful to maintaining high levels of exertion.
Do you buy it? Can music increase performance?
Next up – favourite training tracks. Get ready for a battle of the playlists.