3 Powerful Ways Health Music Can Enhance Athletic Performance
What if I told you that listening to expertly selected music compositions, in specific moments of your physical exercise could improve your health, recovery and physical results?
Music is made up of both many individual components and, especially,relationships between those components. Like in chemistry, where different components create chemical reactions, in music, different elements, such as tempo, rhythm, instrumentation, can trigger different reactions from people like modify breathing patterns, generate positive emotions and many other effects on psychophysiological parameters.
I want to share with you some tips on how integrating Health Music in your daily physical exercise routine will improve your health and recovery. Whether you are an amateur or a professional, you can witness real change. Each of the therapeutic areas described below can be found in Genote with a variety of Health Music protocols to tackle and improve your training and personal health.
We can summarize that major psychophysiological mechanisms, dedicated to increasing physical performance are linked to music’s ability to regulate arousal, and direct and increase our capacity to focus while increasing positive emotional responses and feelings.
Stress Reduction
Practice, strenuous training, and physical activity are often associated with physical and mental stress related to fatigue, change of habits or pressure by competitions and required improvement. However, even if there is a positive side of stress, like cold eustress that allows us to be more reactive and ready to perform, having high levels of continued stress might cause serious health issues. Listening to music can decrease stress and anxiety, cortisol levels, heart rate and blood pressure in people of all ages. Genote Health Music is the largest collection of therapeutic sound and music protocols made available for health, and it is so powerful in reducing stress and anxiety that is currently incorporated both in medical interventions and mental health institutions.
Sleep and Recovery
Recovery is one of the basic principles of training methodology (Rushall & Pyke, 1990). Athletes work hard to prepare and perform successfully. Unfortunately, many ignore or forget the performance benefits and the injury protection derived by including recovery within their daily training programs. Listening to music after intensive exercise has been proven to decrease the time needed to recover (Eliakim et al., 2013). Additionally, the College of Music and Dance in Philadelphia discovered how music was found to decrease anxiety related to illness and medical procedures by increasing the speed and the quality of physical recovery.
Supercompensation theory, showing the role of recovery in athletic performance.
Focus and Motivation
Because music stimulates the reward system, changes mood and enhances focus, it is no surprise that it has been used to attend important competitions and performances. In a study conducted by Dr. Karageorghis and Priest a,b, in 2012 they showed how music lead a range of positive effects, in lowering the perception fatigue, increasing motivation and enhancing perceived energy levels of athletes during physical exercise. Studies also show how music can increase visual perception and visual attention in patients with damage in areas related to perception.
The Yerkes–Dodson law originally developed by psychologist Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson in 1908, dictates that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point.
Training is a matter of balance, motivation and consistency. It is important to keep in mind the direct effect of your routine in the efforts of enhancing your athletic performance. Recovery is a key aspect in building athletic performance. Optimized recovery allows high intensity training and better focus in the execution.