The Influence of Music on Sports Performance

We're entering a realm where opinions are as varied as music styles. Not everyone listens to the same tracks when they train. But regardless, can music really make you stronger, faster, or more enduring? What does the research actually say about music's effect on sports performance—does it enhance it, or does it just make it feel a bit easier? Or is the effect mainly about how the brain interprets pain and fatigue? 

Music in your ears is not allowed in all competition forms, so be ready to train without a constant melody in your ears. Something to keep in mind. 

But now, onto the performance-enhancing effect of music, or?

In a previous article, we mentioned how cooling the palms, forehead, and neck can enhance your performance during intervals. This works largely because cooling contact activates thermoreceptors/cold receptors that send signals to the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus registers the cooling and releases adrenaline, which partly blocks the “cold pain.”

Impulses from mechanical pain receptors are activated during intervals when lactate burns in the legs. These also send signals to the hypothalamus, causing thermal signals and pain signals to compete for attention. The brain can then interpret the pain as less intense than it actually is — we're tricking the brain into thinking it's easier than it really is. Combined with the adrenaline release from the sympathetic nervous system, we can push through those last seconds during an interval.

You can achieve a similar effect with music—perhaps not to the same extent as with cold, but the theory is the same. There's plenty of research on how music can enhance performance when you're on the move.

This is probably one of the most common situations where music plays a role. Here too, it's about "tricking" the brain into thinking it's easier than it really is. In a study from 2015, researchers tested whether the self-selected favorite music of 20 participants affected their performance during intervals. The setup was simple: participants performed four 30-second Wingate intervals with or without music on two different occasions (crossover design). If you haven't done a Wingate test, it involves 30 seconds of all-out effort on a test bike according to a standardized protocol — and yes, it's incredibly demanding. Participants rested four minutes between each interval, and researchers measured peak power, average power, perceived exertion, and how “pleasant” it felt during each interval.

In summary, researchers observed that participants had higher power output (both peak and average) with music and rated the exertion as equally tough as without music. This is good — with the same perceived exertion, you get a higher physiological training effect if the power output (watts) is higher with music. The likely explanation is that an acoustic stimulus (the music) disrupts the pain signals from the legs, thereby altering how hard the brain perceives the effort.

As the image below shows, reality catches up in the end: both with and without music, you are equally tired during the last interval. But until then, participants have received a higher training stimulus with music in their ears.

There are several studies that have examined similar effects, so this is not an isolated occurrence.

The team at Umara admits they have an incredibly poor sense of rhythm. Keeping up with that beat that so many talk about can demand such intense focus on the music for some that they become completely still (you know, the whole idea of multitasking can get tricky for some). Fortunately, there's scientific evidence showing that women benefit more from music during training, so perhaps men have a good excuse there...

In a study, researchers tested 20 women and 15 men by having them complete three 12-minute Cooper tests with a week's rest between each test. All participants took all the tests with scenarios consisting of self-chosen favorite music, non-self-chosen music, or no music at all. Participants had previously rated music genres they liked and received playlists based on this with a specific tempo (137 beats/min). All participants rated jazz as the least preferred for training, and everyone got Nat King Cole's song "Besame Mucho" during one of the tests – hooray?

Women performed better with music than without, and they also performed significantly better with self-chosen favorite music compared to music they didn't like. For men, nothing changed; their performance was the same in all scenarios. So, they didn't perform worse with music; the men simply weren't affected at all. Now, the rhythm-challenged men shouldn't be too discouraged, but this does support the test results that they are essentially quite rhythm-less. They can learn rhythm, but it requires a bit of training before it shows.

Whether you're a Tommy Ivarsson who loves music because your grit isn't as thick as your drive to perform, or a Mikael Ekvall who believes that if you train with music in your ears, you might as well go home because it's unserious – it's up to you to decide.

Many love a rhythmic, monotonous loop in their ears when the intervals get tough, but it's not for everyone, and that's absolutely fine. For some, music is just one of many tricks to push out those last watts or squeeze out the final seconds on the treadmill 😉. 

There is some support for the idea that self-chosen music can help during high-intensity training. But research is not unified, and there are also studies that have not recorded any difference in performance, perceived exertion, or other physiological variables between no music, self-chosen music, or music with a set pace. See music as a potential performance booster – perhaps primarily during intervals and threshold sessions!