Power of Music for Athletes and Home Exercises

Power of Music for Athletes and Home Exercises

Science Café KL with Dr Garry Kuan

The Science Café series is brought to you by the Young Scientists Network-Academy of Sciences Malaysia (YSN-ASM). It is a programme that aims to bring understanding of science to the public. In the first ever virtual Science Café programme, Mr Shawn Keng has brought along his fellow YSN-ASM member Dr Garry Kuan to talk about the power of music for athletes and home exercises.

Most of us think music is an art, but it is also a science as well. Notably during the movement control order (MCO), music has been used for meditation, enjoyment, and entertainment. In this Science Café session, Dr Garry brought viewers to see how music can improve an athlete’s performance. This benefit also extends to the regular person who wants to use music to accompany their home workouts and improve work concentration.

Sports psychologist are professionals that help athletes cope with the intense pressure that comes with competitions and overcome challenges with focus and motivation. They also work on improving athletes’ performance and recover from injuries. Additionally, sports psychologists also help regular people learn how to enjoy sports and learn to adhere to an exercise programme.

Dr Garry is an associate professor at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) teaching sports psychology at the Kubang Kerian Health Campus. He is also an applied sports psychologist – a professional who administers ergogenic aid helps athletes overcome adversities and improve their sports performance.

Music is part of human nature; our bodies respond naturally with our breath, movement, and heartbeat. Dr Garry states that there is an increasing body of evidence that points to the beneficial effects of using the right music to improve frequency, intensity, and duration of sports and exercise behaviour, leading to enhanced motivation. Music enters the brain through its emotional regions, which includes the temporal lobe and the limbic system. It tends to produce a frontal lobe response that is largely emotional and with less logical and moral interpretation.

Dr Garry then elaborated on the elements of music that may affect your behaviour and performance:

• The melody, which refers to the tune of the music, that which we might sing, hum or whistle along.
• The harmony that acts to shape our mood to feel happy, sad, or romantic.
• The rhythm, or the way music is accented and combined with tempo to make people move instinctively in time with it.
• The tempo is the speed at which music is played, measured in beats per minute (bpm).
• The dynamics, or the volume of the music played.

Dr Garry also mentioned the experience of music as an additional element. He says that music is very personal experience; what you enjoy might not be the same for others. It depends on your memory, emotions, your participation in it (whether you sing along or you just listen to music) and familiarisation (how familiar you are to the music will affect how soon will you be affected by it).

Motivational qualities of music determine how much benefits can a piece of music bring to sports performance. The qualities can be influenced by internal and external factors. Internal factors include rhythmic response and your musicality, which indicates how much you enjoy the music. External factors include the cultural impact (how one relates to the origin of the music) and extramusical association (how one relates a piece of music to their personal experience).

How does music improve sports performance? Dr Garry outlined the effects of music as follows:

• Synchronise with your movement to be able to go further
• Dissociate from pain and fatigue to exercise longer
• Improves mood to have an enjoyable workout and for longer
• Regulates arousal; use music to increase energy level before a competition, or to reduce arousal and bring more relaxation, improve concentration, imagery, rehearsal with relaxing music.
• Enhance skill learning, use music to learn new instruments or skills. Notably effective with kids for them to learn new things and memorise easier.

Dr Garry introduced viewers to the Brunel Music Rating Inventory-3, a valid and reliable tool for both researchers and practitioners to assess the motivational qualities of music in exercise and sport environments. In this instance, he uses Inventory-3 which is more suited to general activities.

Dr Garry reveals that when music is synchronised with your movement, there is a 10 to 12 percent improvement to your activity. Even if there is no synchronisation, e.g. different beat or tempo, an 8 percent improvement can still be observed.

With the positive effects of music, Dr Garry cautions against using music in specific conditions where safety rules and regulations need to be applied e.g. triathlon, running, and cycling do not allow music to be used. Athletes were found to be too absorbed in the music flow and this will affect their perception of safety around them.

Then, Dr Garry showed some examples of music used by professional athletes. First, Haile Gebrselassie a retired Ethiopian long-distance track and road-running athlete listened to Scatman by Scatman John. Michael Phelps on the other hand, listens to I’m Me by Lil’ Wayne. One of Dr Garry’s 800m and 1500m runner listens to nature sounds to reduce his arousal before running; weightlifters under Dr Garry’s supervision uses music to enhance their pre-task before competitions.

Next, Dr Garry shows a simple case study using biofeedback, where psychophysiological changes can be observed via electroencephalogram (EEG), galvanic skin response as well as respiratory and heart rate variability. After four sessions, it was observed that subjects were able to control their breathing better. Dr Garry also showed viewers his research on using music in imagery. Three conditions: unfamiliar relaxing music, unfamiliar arousing music, and no music. With URM, it was shown to relax subjects more than UAM and no music. Additionally, fine motor skills in darts athletes were improved with URM compared to UAM and no music. Shooters and weightlifters also showed marked improvements when URM was used in tandem with imagery. Dr Garry’s study also showed differences in using western and local music on the effect of shooters’ performance.

Another research on music and sports by USM tests usage of synchronous music to improve performance in hot and humid conditions. The song used was Untouched by The Veronicas. Participants felt that the music had pushed them to maintain their running for longer. They also felt that the beat led their movement and stimulated the sense of “stride with the music instruction”. In conclusion, synchronous music was shown to be able to positively influence running performance and maintain a positive mood response even in the heat.

A study on brain breaks was completed before the MCO and was published in the British Journal of Sports Science. Brain breaks was found to be able to enhance cognitive skills, sustain attention span, increase motivation to exercise, and is also usable by patients of type-2 diabetes mellitus.