The chances are that if you’re not already a parent, you will either one day be a parent or be old enough to be a parent. At which point something happens in your brain that makes you say things like, “Music isn’t like it was in my day” or, worse, “It all sounds the same.”
It’s a cliche, but your peripheral hearing could be onto something. Actually, a lot of today’s music does sound the same, because it is the same – and that can help when you want to assemble a playlist to help you up that next hill. “Harmonically, most pop songs are based on cycles of chords that people recognise subliminally,” says pianist and composer Roland Perrin. “Artists play around with the template, but each song will use these cycles more often than it doesn’t.”
Familiarity breeds content
And when it comes to running, that familiarity can help. “Music helps you disassociate from the reality of the pain because it gives you something else to focus on, and it helps you to talk yourself into going on,” says Andy Lane, professor of sports psychology at the University of Wolverhampton. “One trick is to break a song into its constituent parts – you’re going to push until the end of the chorus, then to the end of the next verse. This makes it great for interval sessions as well. It creates a sense that we can push that hard because we know it’s going to end, and it’s certainly more inspiring than looking at a stopwatch.”
But that in itself doesn’t explain why music can help us run better. What we do know is that your inner ear contains a spiral sheet that music plucks like a guitar string. This fires brain cells that control hearing and the auditory cortex, just above your ears, generates the conscious experience of music. Different firing patterns excite other groups of cells that associate the sound with feelings, thoughts and past experiences.
And during a long-distance run, stepping back in time can be an excellent motivator. “Nostalgia is great for disassociation,” says Lee Crust, senior lecturer at Lincoln University’s School of Sport and Exercise Science, and a man who spent years studying the links between music and exercise. “Blasts from the past catapult you out of the moment, which is just what you want when the moment involves a pounding heart and pushing through the pain barrier.”
When it comes to tempo, research has found that you are better off running with music you like rather than tunes that match their bpm to your pace. “And you can’t really say that one genre of music works better than another,” Crust adds. “It might appear that hip-hop and high-energy dance tracks, with their fast tempos and heavy basslines, would be the most motivational, but socio-cultural background eclipses musical technicality every time.”
Yet if you can match your playlist’s tempo to your workout, that can be an excellent tool. Start slow and work your way up to sync in with whatever you’re doing, so the bpm corresponds to the level of intensity at which you’re running. “A lot of the research that’s been done is all about endurance,” says Crust. “Here, boredom and fatigue are your biggest enemies, so you’ll need songs that not only keep a constant rhythm but also mean something to you. Save your favourites for now: if you’re extremely ambitious, you can structure your playlist so that slower songs correspond with lower gradients during a hill workout, for example.”
For this reason, it’s good to stick with simple patterns. “What won’t work is complex rhythms, unfamiliar harmonic structures or anything that demands close listening,” says Costas Karageorghis, author of Applying Music In Exercise And Sport. “Avant-garde jazz is too complex and rather hard for exercisers to process. It can be really off-putting during a workout.” The way you listen to music is as important as the tracks you choose, says Karageorghis: “There are three ways sports scientists use music to enhance athlete’s performance. Pre-task, synchronous and asynchronous.”
Pre-task is used to motivate you, and is a broad category – it can be anything that fires you up (from heavy metal to thumping EDM) or can be something that relaxes you and gets you ‘in the zone’ (classical music, ambient). “Synchronous music is something you listen to, ideally through headphones, with the intention of matching each stage of your workout to a specific track,” Karageorghis says. This can build from a slow start as you warm up to maintain a steady rhythm before slowing down again as you cool down. And finally, asynchronous music is less specific background noise that will enhance your mood but doesn’t tie into your workout and allows you to disassociate from the task at hand.
So just what difference can a hand-picked playlist really make? “Our research suggests the right music can’t actually make you run faster,” says Karageorghis. “But what music can do is make the run more enjoyable, so you’re less likely to give up. Music has limited power in terms of influencing what you feel but has considerable leverage on how you feel it. By increasing the pleasure associated with your workout, you will possibly run for longer, and you’re less likely to quit because you’re bored.”
Not that you’d do that anyway, would you?
