Should Listening to Music During Exercise Be Considered a Performance-Enhancing Drug?
Tanner Garrity of InsideHook.com recently published an article tackling this question, featuring a quote from our own Dr. Keith Evans!
Check our this excerpt, and use the button below to read the full article!
That word — “distraction” — is thrown around a lot. Is that, ultimately, music’s role in exercise? To take the mind elsewhere? Or is it revving the body up for the task at hand? According to the research, it might not really matter. Dr. Costas Karageorghis, a professor at Brunel University London, has published what is arguably the most prolific research on the topic. In his book, published in 2010, he estimated listening to music while running can improve a performance by 15%. He told The Guardian two years later: “Music is a legal drug for athletes.”
In 2018, meanwhile, Dr. Jasmin Hutchinson, the director for sport and exercise psychology at Springfield College, told Runner’s World: “It’s pretty definitive that music is performance-enhancing in terms of ergogenic effect.” The Founder and Director of the Atlanta Human Performance Center, Dr. Keith Evans, echoed these conclusions. Speaking to InsideHook, he characterized music as an “indirect performance-enhancing drug.” He says: “Music help elicit endorphins and enkephalins, two opioids that are naturally made within the body. This process elevates mood, then increases the enjoyment of whatever activity you’re performing.”
Clearly, music isn’t a conventional PED. Robert Herbst, a drug supervisor at the Rio Olympics who will reprise his role in Tokyo, is firm on this point. “Like crowd noise, encouragement from a coach or loved one or even a color, mnemonic or sunny day, music is an environmental cue. It’s not a foreign substance ingested or injected into the body to improve performance.” Still, music does seem to wield a stunning impact over fitness, and that’s saying something in an arena where many tend to feel at their most intimidated, lost or insecure. For those of us not accustomed to running two-hour marathons or climbing El Cap, music can be a true difference-maker.
