Saturday, November 3, 2012

What Variable Can CHANGE How Hard You Work Out?? (Shall I sing?)


What can singly help improve your workout experience?  Is it what you ate? Maybe.  Is it if you had a good night's sleep?  Perhaps.  But one thing in particular that can dramatically effect your workout level is MUSIC!!  ACE, the American Council On Exercise wrote this article a few months ago... I find it VERY interesting!!!  I BELIEVE IT ALL!!!!

ACE-sponsored Research: Exploring the Effects of Music on Exercise Intensity


 Despite what you may have heard, the connection between music and exercise didn’t start with Jane Fonda’s dance aerobics or the Sony Walkman portable cassette player. Try 300 B.C. Probably even earlier.
“You go all the way back to rowers on the Roman Galleys,” says Carl Foster, Ph.D., of the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, Exercise and Health Program. “The guy is sitting there beating on his drum and he drives the basic rhythm of the rowing. Part of that is coordination—you want the rowers to row together—but part of it is that people will naturally follow a tempo. It’s just something about the way our brains work.”
Foster is describing a principle called entrainment or synchronization. “Basically you get with the beat of the music,” says Foster, who’s been leading researchers at the University of Wisconsin in their studies of music and exercise intensity for the past eight years. “You want to step at the rate the music is playing or you want to pedal a cycle at the rate of the dominant beat of the music.” 
You probably don’t need an exercise scientist to tell you that music makes exercise more enjoyable, but what is its true effect on physical performance? 
“Music is like is a legal drug for athletes,” says Costas Karageorghis, Ph.D., from London’s Brunel University School of Sport and Education, one of the world’s leading authorities on music and exercise. “It can reduce the perception of effort significantly and increase endurance by as much as 15 percent.”
Over the past 20 years of research, Karageorghis has identified three primary things about music that could possibly influence exercise performance: 1) the tendency to move in time with synchronous sounds (e.g., tapping your toe in time with music or the beat of a drum); 2) the tendency of music to increase arousal (e.g., the desire to move rather than to sit); and 3) the tendency for music to distract the exerciser from discomfort that might be related to exercise.
Buoyed by Karageorghis’ landmark research, Foster and John Porcari, Ph.D., have supervised more than half a dozen research studies on the effect of music on exercise intensity. As a whole, that body of research further supports the notion that synchronous music tends to drive exercise intensity (i.e., the faster the beat, the higher the intensity). Researchers also clearly identified the effect of increased arousal related to the tempo of music, thereby making intense exercise seem less stressful.

For the rest of the article, click here: http://www.acefitness.org/certifiednewsarticle/805/ace-sponsored-research-exploring-the-effects-of/?fb_comment_id=fbc_10150204595685820_26715674_10151268098005820#fbc95b2b11312a


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