Listening to music while you work out may boost performance. It seems like most people in today’s gyms are wearing headphones and a new study out this week shows why having some our own personal playlist may be so appealing. The authors “recruited 20 young, healthy adult volunteers, without experience in high-intensity interval training….Using stationary bicycles, they completed four 30-second bouts of what the researchers call “all-out” pedaling, at the highest intensity that each volunteer could stand. Each 30-second bout was followed by four minutes of recovery time.” The participants repeated the regimen on two other occasions, once with their own music and once without. “The volunteers all reported that the intervals had been hard. In fact, their feelings about the difficulty were almost identical, whether they had been listening to music or not. What is interesting is that their power output had been substantially greater when they were listening to music, but they did not find that effort to be more unpleasant.” Planning to push yourself during your next workout? Make sure you have some tunes to keep you company.

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