Creating music too can boost workouts

Researchers and exercisers have long known,of course,that listening to music alters the experience of exercising. But to date,no one had thought to investigate whether creating music might have an effect on workouts.

So,for the new study,which was published online last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognition and Brain Sciences in Leipzig,Germany,and other institutions began by inventing an electronic kit that could be integrated into the internal workings of weight-training machines,transforming them into oversize boom boxes. Once installed,the kit would produce a range of propulsive,electronic-style music with a variety of sound levels and rhythms,depending on how the machines weight bar or other mechanisms were manipulated during workouts.

The researchers installed the kits into three different workout machines. They then recruited a group of 63 healthy men and women and divided them into groups,each of which was assigned to use one of the musically equipped machines during a strenuous though brief six-minute exercise session. Participants could express themselves on the machines by,for instance,modulating rhythms and creating melodies, said Thomas Hans Fritz,a researcher at the Max Planck Institute who led the study.

During a separate session,each group used the same machines,but minus the musical add-ons,while elsewhere in the gym,others sweated at the musically equipped machines.

The results showed that most of the volunteers had generated significantly greater muscular force while working at the musically equipped machines than the unmodified ones. They also had used less oxygen to generate that force. Their movements were also more smooth,resulting in a steadier flow of music.